- Ben Goertzel
Ben Goertzel (born
December 8 ,1966 inRio de Janeiro ,Brazil ), is an American author and researcher in the field ofartificial intelligence . He currently leads "Novamente LLC", a privately heldsoftware company that attempts to develop a form ofstrong AI they call "Artificial General Intelligence". He is also theCEO of "Biomind LLC", a company that markets a software product for the AI-supported analysis of biologicalmicroarray data; and he is Director of Research of theSingularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence .Goertzel is the son of
Ted Goertzel , a professor of sociology atRutgers University . [ [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D05E3DE1739F936A35752C1A963958260 Pauling's Prizes] , "The New York Times",5 November 1995 ] He obtained aPh.D. in mathematics fromTemple University in 1989, then taught mathematics, computer science and psychology at various universities, including theUniversity of Nevada ,City University of New York , theUniversity of Waikato , and theUniversity of Western Australia .From 1997 until 2001 he headed "Webmind Inc." (also known as "Intelligenesis Corp."), a company that he had founded and that attempted to use artificial intelligence for the analysis of financial markets. This work was reviewed by the "
Wall Street Journal " ["Mathematician Sees The Mind as a Model For Company Intranets", "The Wall Street Journal,22 May 1998 ] and "The New York Times " [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9906E3DB153BF93BA35751C0A96F958260 Can a computer program figure out the market? A former analyst and a mathematician are betting that theirs can] , "The New York Times",8 February 1999 ] , explaining the approach asmachine learning combined withnatural language processing applied to textual information gathered from the internet, in order to predict business risk or to aid in making buying decisions.He explained his approach to creating Artificial General Intelligence in a
Google Tech talk in May 2007. [ [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4740557046246483319 Google Tech Talk by Ben Goertzel] ,30 May 2007 ] He defines intelligence as the ability to detect patterns in the world and in the agent itself. He tries to create a "baby-like" artificial intelligence first, and then raise and train this agent in a simulated or virtual world such asSecond Life [ [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6992613.stm "Online worlds to be AI incubators"] ,BBC News,13 September 2007 ] to produce a more powerful intelligence. [ [http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyId=11&articleId=9036438&intsrc=hm_topic "Virtual worlds making artificial intelligence apps 'smarter'"] , "Computerworld ",13 September 2007 ] Knowledge is represented in a network whose nodes and links carry probabilistic truth values as well as "attention values", with the attention values resembling the weights in aneural network . Several algorithms operate on this network, the central one being a combination of a probabilisticinference engine and a custom version ofevolutionary programming . [ [http://www.novamente.net/file/WCCI06_Patterns.pdf "Patterns, Hypergraphs and Embodied General Intelligence"] , Ben Goertzel, WCCI Panel Discussion: [http://139.78.75.247/WCCI-Web_Panel_bio.html "A Roadmap to Human-Level Intelligence"] , July 2006] He claims that this combination is able to avoid the combinatorial explosions that both these algorithms suffer from when exposed to large problems.In an August 2008 audio interview, [ [http://www.thefutureandyou.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=368080 The Future and You] , 13 August 2008] Goertzel stated that he is a founding member of the transhumanist
Order of Cosmic Engineers , that he has signed up with Alcor to have his body frozen after his death, and that he expects to live essentially indefinitely barring some catastrophic accident. He also promoted the Singularity Institute'sOpenCog project which aims to build anopen source general artificial intelligence engine.Publications
Goertzel has written numerous research papers and journalistic articles. His books include:
* "The Structure of Intelligence: A New Mathematical Model of Mind" (Springer, 1993)
* "The Evolving Mind" (Gordon and Breach, 1993)
* "Chaotic Logic: Language, Thought and Reality From the Perspective of Complex Systems Science" (Plenum Press, 1994)
* "Linus Pauling : A Life in Science and Politics" (Basic Books, 1995). Written with his father Ted Goertzel.
* "From Complexity to Creativity" (Plenum Press, 1997)
* "Creating Internet Intelligence" (Plenum Press, 2001).
* "Mind in Time" (Hampden Press, 2003) co-edited by Allan Combs and Mark Germine.
* "Artificial General Intelligence: Cognitive Technologies" (Springer, 2005), co-edited with Cassio Pennachin, describes the mathematics underpinning the Novamente AI Engine.
* "The Hidden Pattern: A Patternist Philosophy of Mind" (Brown Walker Press, 2006)
* "The Path to Posthumanity" (Academica, 2006) co-authored with Stephan Vladimir Bugaj
* "Advances in Artificial General Intelligence" (IOS Press, 2007) co-edited with Pei WangReferences
External links
* [http://www.goertzel.org/ Ben Goertzel's web site and blog]
* [http://www.novamente.net/ Novamente LLC]
* [http://www.biomind.com/ Biomind LLC]
* [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=760505614870506496 Artificial Intelligence and Human Immortality] , video of Ben Goertzel presentation at theImmortality Institute conference,17 May 2006
* [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4740557046246483319 Google Tech Talk by Ben Goertzel] ,30 May 2007
* [http://www.singinst.org/media/interviews/bengoertzel Interview of Ben Goertzel] , by theSingularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
* [http://www.singinst.org/summit2007/audio/ss07-bengoertzel.mp3 Nine Years to a Positive Singularity – If We Really, Really Try] . Speech given by Ben Goertzel at the Singularity Summit in September 2007
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