University of Illinois Springfield Professor of Mathematical Sciences and Philosophy Peter Boltuc is part of a team developing technologies for the next generation of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Boltuc, a UIS Computer Science faculty associate, is part of Simuli.ai, one of the top Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) startup teams in the world. He joined the team while serving as a fraction-time professor of management theory at UIS’ online institutional partner SGH, The Warsaw School of Economics.
AGI is a type of artificial intelligence that possesses the ability to understand, learn and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks and domains, similar to how human intelligence works. Unlike specialized AI systems that excel at specific tasks, AGI aims to exhibit general intelligence and flexibility, enabling it to perform various intellectual tasks at a level comparable to or even surpassing human capabilities.
Boltuc is exploring ways that AGI can be used to improve the way businesses and organizations operate through a process called digital transformation. Specifically, he wants to find ways to use AGI to make business offerings more valuable to consumers.
“My interest and some experience in working with AGI paradigms, combined with my strong interest in digital transformation, provide me a somewhat unique perspective of the role of future AGI on the next stages of digital transformation in industry and other domains,” Boltuc said.
When it comes to emerging technology, Boltuc said people often pay attention to “the next big thing,” such as IBM Watson, which was popular in the past but is now no longer in use. More recently, there has been interest in the Metaverse, which emerged in 2022 and is now becoming more specialized, similar to previous trends like Second Life and other short-lived fads.
“ChatGPT, though very important for many issues is also a limited system of internet chat, analyzing very big data; yet, leaving little space for novel theories like Einstein’s Relativity, or Quantum physics, when it was new,” Boltuc said. “I try to gauge essentially new technologies in AI leaning towards AGI and rely on them to extrapolate towards related socio-economics.”
At UIS, Boltuc teaches a class on the Philosophy of AI, which heavily focuses on the research of cognitive scientist Ben Goertzel. Boltuc has worked with Goertzel to save the International Journal of Machine Consciousness and plan the Conference on Machine Consciousness in Shanghai 2016. Boltuc has also built on Goertzel’s research in paraconsistent logic as a way for various AI systems to communicate.
Boltuc earned his doctorate in morality and partiality from Bowling Green State University and holds two advanced degrees from Warsaw University. He served as The Louise Hartman Schewe and Karl Schewe Endowed Professor in Liberal Arts and Sciences at UIS from 2013-2016.