Curriculum Vitae: John Storrs Hall

Curriculum Vitae: John Storrs Hall

• Ph.D. (Computer Science) Rutgers University, 1994 Thesis: Associative Processing: Architectures, Algorithms, Applications. Advisor: Saul Levy

• M.S. (Computer Science) Rutgers University, 1994

• B.A. (Mathematics) Drew University, 1976, cum laude, honors in Mathematics, Ciba-Geigy award in Mathematics

Other Affiliations

• Working group member and editor, Technology Roadmap for Artificial General Intelligence

• Working group member, Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems

• Associate Editor, International Journal of Nanotechnology and Molecular Computation

• A licensed private pilot

Awards and Fellowships

• “Artificial Responsibility,” (keynote) Beyond AI: Artificial Golem Intelligence, Nov. 12-14, 2013, Univ. Western Bohemia, Plzen, CZ

• “Where is my flying car?”, Aug 11-13, 2013, Newman University, Wichita, KS

• “Machine Agency,” We Robot, Apr. 21-22, 2012, Univ. of Miami Law School

• Keynote address, Writers of the Future, Apr. 15, 2012, Los Angeles, CA

• “The Economics of Singularity,” AGI-11, Aug. 3-6, 2011, Mountain View, CA

• “Feynman's Pathway to Nanotechnology,” SME NanoManufacturing Conf., Apr. 14-15, 2010, Mesa, AZ

• “Roadmaps to Nanotech and AGI,” Foresight 2010, Jan 16, 2010, Palo Alto, CA

• “Artilect War or Utopia?”, debate with Hugo deGaris, at AGI-09 Workshop on the Future of AI, Mar 9th, 2009, Arlington, VA

• “The Weather Machine: Nano-enabled Climate Control for Earth”, Global Catastrophic Risks Conference, 14 Nov 2008, Mountain View, CA

• “Nanotechnology, AI and Machine Conscience”, Dec 19, 2007, Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group, Newport, RI

• “Beyond AI”, Nov 1, 2007, National Institutes of Health Biomedical Computing Interest Group, Bethesda, MD

• “Asimov's Laws of Robotics: Revised”, Singularity Summit II, Sep. 9, 2007, San Francisco, CA

• “What Could a Nanofactory Make?”, CRN World Care Conference, Sep. 12, 2007, Tucson, AZ

• “On Machine Ethics,” The American Philosophical Association Eastern Division 103rd Annual Meeting, Dec. 30, 2006, Washington, DC

• “Ethics for Machines,” December 10, 2006, Terasem 2nd Annual Colloquium, Melbourne Beach, FL

• “A Door into Summer,” October 7, 2006, 6th Alcor Conference, Scottsdale, AZ

• “Toward Instant Manufacturing,” (keynote) Society of Manufacturing Engineers Conference on The Next Industrial Revolution: Nanotechnology & Manufacturing, Aug 23, 2006, Oak Ridge, TN

• “Utility Fog: The Stuff that Dreams Are Made Of” June 3, 2006, Subtle Technologies: Responsive Architectures, Toronto, Canada

• “Self-Replicating Machines: Prometheus Unchained or Playing with Fire?” February 3, 2005, Lab Automation 2005, San Jose, CA

• “Nanotechnology” (debate) August 26, 2005, Surface Science Summer School, University of Nottingham, UK

• “Design and Analysis Techniques for Complex Nanosystems” October 2004, The 1st Advanced Nanotechnology Conference, Washington, DC

• “Nanotechnology: As Hardware Becomes Software” June 14, 2003, Usenix 2003, San Antonio, TX

• “Molecular Manufacturing for Advanced Transportation” November 2000, Exxon Mobil Research Club, Annandale, NJ

• “Nanotechnology: 2001 - 3000” April 2000, Foundation for the Future, Bellvue, WA

• “Discrete Laminar Flow in Robotic Fluids,” December 1997, NASA Ames

• “Molecular Nanotechnology: Possibilities and Prospects,” June 1996, Frontier Research Seminars

• “Reversible Logic,” given in 1995 at Bell Labs and MIT to T. Knight's reversible computing group

• “Nanocomputers and Reversible Logic”, Third Foresight Conference on Nanotechnology, Palo Alto. November 1993

Publications and Patents

• Adams, Sam S, Itamar Arel, Joscha Bach, Robert Coop, Rod Furlan, Ben Goertzel, J. Storrs Hall, Alexei Samsonovich, Matthias Scheutz, Matthew Schlesinger, Stuart C. Shapiro, John Sowa (2012) “Mapping the Landscape of Human-Level Artificial General Intelligence,” AI Magazine, 33:1 Spring 2012, in press.

• Hall, J. S. (2011) “Further Reflections on the Timescale of AI”, Solomonoff 85th Memorial Conference, Monash Univ, Melbourne, Australia, 30 Nov–2 Dec 2011

• Hall, J. S. (2011) “Ethics for Machines” in Machine Ethics, Michael Anderson & Susan Leigh Anderson (Eds), Cambridge University Press (May 9, 2011) ISBN 0521112354, pp28-46

• Hall, J. S. (2011) “Ethics for Self-Improving Machines” in Machine Ethics, Michael Anderson & Susan Leigh Anderson (Eds), Cambridge University Press (May 9, 2011) ISBN 0521112354, pp512-523

• Hall, J. S. (2009) "The robotics path to AGI using Servo Stacks", Artificial General Intelligence 2009, Arlington, VA

• Hall, J. S. (2008) "Variac: an Autogenous Cognitive Architecture", Artificial General Intelligence 2008: Proceedings of the First AGI Conference, P. Wang, B. Goertzel, & S. Franklin, eds, IOS Press, pp176-187

• Hall, J. S. (2008) “Engineering Utopia”, Artificial General Intelligence 2008: Proceedings of the First AGI Conference, P. Wang, B. Goertzel, & S. Franklin, eds, IOS Press, pp460-467

• Hall, J. S. (2007) “Self-improving AI: An Analysis”, Minds & Machines 17:249-259

• Hall, J. S. (2007) Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine (Amherst, NY: Prometheus) ISBN 1591025117

• Hall, J. S. (2006) “Ethics for Artificial Intellects”, in Nanoethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Nanotechnology, Allhoff, Lin, Moor, & Weckert, eds, Wiley Interscience, Hoboken, NJ

• Hall, J. S. (2006) “Nano-enabled AI: Some Philosophical Issues”, International Journal of Applied Philosophy 20:2, pp 247-261

• Hall, J. S. (2006) “Self-improving AI: An Analysis”, AI@50: The Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence Conference: The Next Fifty Years, July 13-15, 2006, Hanover, NH

• Hall, J. S. (2006) “Is AI Near a Takeoff Point?” Nanotechnology Perceptions V 2 (1a) March 2006, pp 57-61.

• Hall, J. S. and K. Eric Drexler (2005) “Design and Analysis of a Molecular Sorting Rotor” Ninth Foresight Conference on Nanotechnology, October 22-27, 2005

• Hall, J. S. (2005) “A Space Pier”, International Space Development Conference, Arlington, VA, May 19-22

• Hall, J. S. (2005) Nanofuture: What's Next for Nanotechnology (Amherst, NY: Prometheus) ISBN 1591022878

• (2002) US Patent number 6,367,052: Method of producing optimized designs using computer systems and designs produced therefrom (with Steinberg and Davison)

• Hall, J. S. (2000): “Nanotechnologies”, subject article, Macmillan Encyclopedia of Energy, Macmillan, New York

• Hall, J. S. (1999): “Architectural considerations for self-replicating manufacturing systems”, Nanotechnology V 10 no. 3 pp. 323-330

• Hall, J. Storrs (1999): “Towards a Hardware Description Language for Molecular Machinery”, Seventh Foresight Conference on Nanotechnology, Santa Clara, CA

• Hall, J Storrs, Louis Steinberg and Brian D Davison (1998) ”Combining agoric and genetic methods in stochastic design”, Nanotechnology 9 No 3 (September 1998) 274-284

• Steinberg, L., Hall, J., and Davison, B. (1998): “Highest Utility First Search Across Multiple Levels of Stochastic Design”, pp. 477-484. Proceedings of the Fifteenth National Conference on AI, Madison, 1998.

• Hall, J. Storrs (1997): “Combining Agoric and Genetic Methods in Stochastic Design”, Fifth Foresight Conference on Nanotechnology, Palo Alto, CA

• Hall, J. Storrs, Louis Steinberg, and Brian D. Davison (1997): “Rational Control of Stochastic Design”, IASTED/ISMM International Conference on Modeling and Simulation, pp. 97-84. Pittsburgh, PA; IASTED/ACTA Press, Anaheim CA.

• Hall, J. Storrs, and D. Smith (1996): “Database Mining and Matching in the Rutgers CAM”, in Associative Processing and Processors, Argy Kirkelis and Charles Weems, eds., IEEE CS Press.

• Hall, J. S. (1996): “Utility Fog: the Stuff that Dreams are Made Of”, in B. C. Crandall, ed., Nanotechnology: Molecular Speculations on Global Abundance, (MIT Press) pp.161-184.

• Hall, J. S. (1994): “Nanocomputers and Reversible Logic”, Nanotechnology, V. 5 no. 3 pp. 157ff

• Hall, J. S. (1994): “Fornax: A General-Purpose Programming Language”, USENIX Symposium on Very High Level Languages , October 26-28, 1994, Santa Fe, New Mexico

• Hall, J. S. (1994): “A Reversible Instruction Set Architecture and Algorithms”, Proc. Physics of Computation Workshop, IEEE Press.

• Hall, J. S., and D. Smith (1993): “Database Mining and Matching in the Rutgers CAM”, Proc. Associative Processing and Applications Workshop, Syracuse University.

• Hall, J. S. (1993):: “Utility Fog: A Universal Physical Substance”, Vision-21, Westlake, OH; NASA Conference Publication 10129, pp. 115-126

• Hall, J. S. (1993): “An Electroid Switching Model for Reversible Computer Architectures”, Proc. 1992 Physics of Computation Workshop, IEEE Press.

• Hall, J. S., and D. Smith (1992): “Collective Functions in the Rutgers CAM”, Proc. Associative Processing and Applications Workshop, Syracuse University.

• Hall, J.S. and S. Y. Levy (1989): “Von Neumanizing the Multi-Search Content Addressable Memory”, Proc. Fifth Annual CSCI Symposium on Massively Parallel Processing, pp. 27-42, University of South Carolina

• Murdocca, M. J., Hall, J. S., Levy, S. Y, and Smith, D (1989): “Proposal for an Optical Content Addressable Memory”, Proc. Optical Society of America Topical Meeting on Optical Computing, Technical Digest Series

• Hall, J. S. (1988): “Managing Large, Distributed, Dynamic, Fractious Text Sources”, Proc. AAAI-88 Workshop on AI and Hypertext, pp. 74-75.

• Hall, J. S., Levy, S. Y, and Murdocca, M. J. (1987): “Design Techniques for an Optical Connection Machine”, Proc. AIAA Computers in Aerospace VI, pp. 195-200, Wakefield Mass.

• Hall, J. S. (1981): “A General-Purpose CAM-based System”, in VLSI Systems and Computations, H. T. Kung, Bob Sproull, and Guy Steele, eds., Computer Science Press, Rockville MD

• Hall, J. S. (1976): “Proof and Knowledge”, Bachelor's Thesis, Drew University

Scientific Accomplishments

My contributions have been fairly eclectic, coming in a number of fields: In the physics of computation: I was co-inventor of adiabatic logic, independently but concurrently with Merkle and Athas. I published one of the earliest descriptions of a reversible/dissipation-limited instruction set architecture.

Algorithms: I published the first parallel version of Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm for content addressable memory (CAM). This was followed by a large number of other novel CAM algorithms for various applications, including AI, database, vision, graphics, and compilers.

Computer architecture: I contributed to the design of the ITT CAP, designed an unnamed architecture for optical computers to be constructed from arrays of Fabry-Perot etalons, and was the prime architect of the Rutgers Short Stack and CAM2000 associative processors. My analysis of speedup and latency in collective functions for associative processing (PhD dissertation) may have contributed to the collapse of the field in the mid-1990's.

Programming languages: I designed the CAML language (the associative one, not the functional one) and the Linear C language for associative processing. Linear C was the first (and to my knowledge, still the only) language which permitted parallelization of a legacy sequential code on a completely incremental, statement-by-statement basis. I designed the VHL language Fornax, and the HDL language Caslor, an early attempt at a language that integrated hardware and controller software design.

AI and design automation: I invented a method for utility-based optimization of multi-level search-based stochastic design. I designed and implemented a program which designed pipelined microprocessors given a description of the desired instruction set.

Agoric systems: I independently invented the agoric control concept in the mid-1980's. Although unpublished at the time, I led a seminar and a student implementation effort in an attempt to develop it. I designed the programming language Emptors, an agoric variant of Actors. I designed, implemented, and published about Charles Smith, a system which used a combination of agoric and genetic techniques in automatic design.

Nanotechnology and futurism: I am best known in the popular science world for my inventions involving nanotechology. Foremost among these is Utility Fog, one of the earliest but also the most thoroughgoing of the robot swarm/intelligent material concepts. (It was developed enough to be the subject of an invited technical talk at NASA Ames.) More recently I have received attention for the "Hall Tower", an advanced low-cost orbital-launch concept.

Machine Ethics: My paper "Ethics for Machines", published on the WWW in 2000, is one of the seminal works in the cross-disciplinary field of machine ethics. This is the subject of my latest book, Beyond AI.