The original goal of the AI field was the construction of “thinking machines” – that is, computer systems with human-like general intelligence. Due to the difficulty of this task, for the last few decades the majority of AI researchers have focused on what has been called “narrow AI” – the production of AI systems displaying intelligence regarding specific, highly constrained tasks.

In recent years, however, more and more researchers have recognized the necessity – and feasibility – of returning to the original goals of the field. Increasingly, there is a call for a transition back to confronting the more difficult issues of “human level intelligence” and more broadly artificial general intelligence (AGI).

The AGI conferences are the only major conference series devoted wholly and specifically to the creation of AI systems possessing general intelligence at the human level and ultimately beyond.

Continuing the mission of the first three AGI conferences (most recently AGI- 10, held at the University of Lugano, Switzerland), in August 2011, AGI-11 was held at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. AGI-11 gathered an international group of leading academic and industry researchers involved in scientific and engineering work aimed directly toward the goal of artificial general intelligence.

Keynote speeches were delivered by Ernst Dickmanns, the pioneer of selfdriving cars, Peter Norvig, co-author of the highest-cited AI textbook, Zhongzhi Shi, and Aaron Sloman. The special session on neuroscience and AGI included a keynote speech delivered by Ed Boyden, a co-founder of optogenetics. Of the 103 submissions, 28 were accepted as full papers for this volume (27%), and 26 as short papers. Enjoy!