Todor Arnaudov's Research

Contact: tosh.bg - gmail - com | dzbe at mail bg
Looking for R&D, buisness and creative opportunities and partnership!

[Следи за новини във Фейсбук групата по Универсален изкуствен разум]

Todor "Tosh" Arnaudov is the author of the world's first interdisciplinary University courses in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) back in 2010 and 2011. He presented them at Plovdiv University, where he holds a MSc in Software Technologies - second? grades; thesis - design of the Speech Synthesizer "Glas 2", improved version of his "Glas 2004" (as first year student, C++ and Win32). BSc in Informatics, 2007 (Computer Science) - first grades, Plovdiv University. Thesis: refactoring and integration of the UML Editor Violet for the e-learning environment Selbo (Java); second BSc thesis: "Smarty - an extendable framework for comprehension asisstants" - the most advanced? "intelligent" dictionary at the time (NLP, Wordnet & Balkanet, C#, GUI) - as an intern at the Research group in Computational Linguistics at the University of Wolverhampton, UK, presented at LREC 2008, IMSCIT 2008).

He was the first to support and promote and the first and most frequent winner of prizes for ideas and contributions to Boris Kazachenko's Cognitive Algorithm AGI project from 2010 until 2018 and still contributing. "CogAlg" is implementing unsupervised non-neuromorphic online* deep learning. Initially developed theoretically, lately coded in Python. Since mid 2019 Todor works on a C++ fork-spin-off project called for now SuperCogAlg and is looking for partners to create a company centered around it and around code synthesis/meta-models of programming systems etc.

I will create a thinking machine that will self-improve - an interview from 2009, which he gave for the Bulgarian's popular science magazine "Obekty".

Browse the AGI lecture slides, articles and other materials mostly in Bulgarian and a selection in English, see also the Artificial Mind blog - one of the first dedicated to AGI since late 2007, continuing the Bulgarian avant-garde e-zine "Sacred Computer", covering AGI topics since the early 2000s. The e-zine included a number of Todor's works on his early AGI theory: "...of Universe and Mind" which he wrote as a teenager. They eventually lead him to discovering in 2007 that Jeff Hawkins's Memory Prediction Framework and the Hierarchical Temporal Memory were in a similar sensori-motor and conceptual direction; a bit later he found the works of other related AGI researchers - Hutter, Schmidhuber - and Kazachenko's "Cognitive Algorithm", which also shared common ideas regarding the incremental development, prediction and compression.

  • As an undergraduate he was an intern at the Wolverhampton research group in Computational Linguistics, where in several months he created from scratch a working prototype of a GUI NLP software that participated at LREC 2008 and IMCSIT 2008 - Smarty - an extendable framework for comprehension assistants. Download

    As early as a first year student he worked as a researcher-developer in Plovdiv University, as un undergraduate - a developer in a video-transition effects company called Transmutators; as an MSc student he was one of the initial handful of engineers in a fabless semiconductor startup called "ASIC Depot", later acquired by Broadcom.

  • Todor's experience in software development begins in his late pre-teens and an Apple IIe clone on which he managed to understand and code 3D graphics and smooth high frame rate animation (in machine code) several years later in 1998-1999. He has developed a wide range of software in various programming languages and platforms: for example DSP and sound processing - the Bulgarian speech synthesizers "Glas 2004" (for a few weeks as a first year student) and "Toshko 2" (C++), attempts in unsupervised learning in the speech domains as a first year student; Transferrer-8M: software for transferring diskettes from Apple][ to PC via the cassette output, first version before his 17 birthday (DSP, decoding, BASIC, machine code, Pascal; one year later - a Windows version - C, Win32). Computer graphics and simple games (BASIC, Pascal, Assembler, C++, OpenGL, DirectX, HLSL, GLSL, Python); video editing, video streaming, image processing, visual effects and computer vision (C/C++, Win32, DirectX, OpenCV, Python); electronic dictionaries ("Езикотворец"/Ezikotvorets, Smarty), NLP, parsers, text pattern matching (C/C++, C#, Java, Regular expressions, Perl); Working memory-General Desktop Assistant (C# - for internal use); GUI software (Win32, MFC, C# Windows Forms); some PHP/Javascript and various experimental and research software.

  • Todor has a general curiosity, diversity of talents, interests and activities, besides computer science, software development, AGI and the directly related sciences such as (developmental) psychology, neuroscience, cybernetics, cognitive science, etc.

  • He has been involved with creative activities and studies in all kinds of creative and performing arts and storytelling, filmmaking and videography. He's been studying and authoring pieces related to humanities; philosophy, linguistics, sociolinguistics (see DZBE), language learning, social science, developmental psychology; history, politics. He also loves and practises sports.


    Todor had prizes in art competitions as a child, wrote his first naive science fiction fantasies the summer before starting school ("Many Adventures in the Big space"), author of satirical prose, of experimental and social poetry as 18 years old ("Gamers" - about computers, computer games, the history of Bulgarian computer industry); author of lyrical poetry; author of the SF philosophical novella about AGI "The Truth" as an 18 year old back in 2002; author of the SF-fantastic novel "Ada" at 19, dedicated to Ada Byron. He has second prize in a literary competition from Plovdiv University as a student. Todor has created a few demo music pieces and is author of the arragements, improvisation and/or performance of the most ot the music in his short films (plays the electric guitar and some keyboard), where he's participating also as an actor, a camera operator; editor etc. (...)

  • Todor has worked in media. He was a writer for the popular science magazine "Obekty", recently was an author of an interdisciplinary article in the newspaper of Plovdiv University "Escape from the Brave Video World", was a screen writer of an educational film about photography, produced by Bulgarian National Television (BNT) - Megapixels. He is a creator- writer, videographer, video editor, actor of/in documentaries and short films and music videos and often produces them with editing and visual effects software developed by himself (Twenkid FX Studio, still a prototype for internal use, not published yet). He had several appearances in prime time on BNT.

  • Author and publisher of avant-garde literature - creator of the interdisciplinary-multidisciplinary e-zine "Sacred Computer" (Свещеният сметач), one of the first e-zines on the Bulgarian Internet, first issue in late 2000 at age 16, probably one of the first in the world about AGI research (since 2001), regular until 2004, one more issue in 2005, to be continued in 2019.


    He's also author of the more recent avant-garde e-zine "Razumir" (2014-2015-) focused on social science, philosophy, culture and art, satirical creative writing, political and historical analysis etc.

  • He enjoys and is interested in social and community-building non-profit volunteer's activities. He was the founder and participant researcher, writer and developer of the sociolinguistics virtual association DZBE (ДЗБЕ - Дружество за защита на българския език), the so called Younashki dialect, sociolinguistics articles, poetry and prose (including the AI philosophical novella "The Truth"), electronic dictionaries. That happened back in his teenage years in early 2000s and parts of his work influenced or was published, in one extent or another, in publications of at least two academic sociolinguistics researchers and reached several mainstream media.

  • In more recent years he was one of the founders of the Plovdiv's hackerspace "Hackafe" (2013), where he is known as the artist among the members as he was a proponent, organizer and an electric guitar player in small musical jam sessions and creator of the exhibition and installation "Hacker-artists and friends" (Feb 2017), where he was the principal author, participating also with literature, photography and video pieces and a multi-art-and-location-based installation.

    • See Todor's active research blog Artificial Mind

    Todor is looking for R&D and creative opportunities and collaboration.

    Contact: tosh.bg - gmail - com | dzbe at mail - bg