Adlershof Intelligence
AiBrain aims to develop a completely autonomous artificial brain
The small business AIBrain has big plans: to develop an artificial intelligence that thinks, learns, remembers and solves problems like a human. The artificial brain is already working in the company’s first products.
Richard H. Shinn simply had to start a business. “It gives you a certain sense of freedom. And only then could I follow my passion to build an artificial human intelligence,” he relates. For a good 30 years, Shinn has been researching and developing in the field of artificial intelligence. In 2012, he started his company AIBrain in Silicon Valley and, last year, he moved into rooms in the Adlershof Innovation and Business Incubation Centre (IGZ) and in the Charlottenburg Innovation Centre (CHIC), in order to establish the sales, marketing and R&D office in the European Economic Area.
His passion has since culminated in a promising international company with further branches in South Korea and China, and with ambitious goals: “We want to build a completely autonomous AI that unifies the three essential aspects of human intelligence: problem-solving, learning and memory.” The AI will not only constantly learn, it will also be able to remember, draw conclusions from what it knows, and identify and solve problems on its own. “In a certain way, it is an intelligent search for our own life. That’s what fascinates me about AI – it provides the opportunity to capture human intelligence.”
This comprehensive approach that Shinn and his team are pursuing is the unique selling point of his fully autonomous AI agent called “AICoRE”, which will provide intelligence to software language assistants, games and robots.
The first products are aimed primarily at kids, Shinn explains, who are open to new technologies but who are all too often inundated with not-so smart gadgets. AI can be used cleverly and smartly to impart knowledge. That is the aim of “Tyche”, an AI learning toy for kids. “Tyche” is a robot that is much more than just a moving mechanical tin dragon. You can talk to it in natural language. You can also use it to build your own robot with its own capabilities. “That will inspire kids to think and ultimately improve their intellectual abilities, I hope,” Shinn says. The AI robot for kids will be sold through online marketplaces such as Amazon.
Another product ready for launch is “fAutonomy”, an AI game development tool that allows children to easily program their own video games and mobile games. And with “DAIsy”, AIBrain is working on a language learning assistant that can help one can learn a foreign language as quickly and smoothly as possible – a little each day as though being taught by a native friend. To begin with, “DAIsy” will only speak English. More languages will then follow.
Shinn, himself, admits that would help him enormously on his visits to the Adlershof branch of his company. Nevertheless, he is not really here for the language. “I appreciate the modern location and the proximity to the Humboldt-Universität,” he explains with a view to possible research cooperatives. Overall, he is in fact quite taken with Berlin, which he enthusiastically describes as “a business-friendly city with intelligent people, art and universities at the heart of Europe.” While he found it difficult to recruit people in the USA, South Korea and China, he hopes to have more luck with that here in the capital. Especially seeing as a very promising AI scene is developing here. Could Berlin even become a hotspot for AI? “Sure. After all, it’s a great European metropolis for young people from all over the world.”
By Chris Löwer for Adlershof Journal