Ben Goertzel

Ben Goertzel
Dr. Ben Goertzel after giving a talk at the 2009 Humanity+ Summit in Irvine California
Born	(1966-12-08) December 8, 1966 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Ben Goertzel (born December 8, 1966, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is an American author and researcher in the field of artificial intelligence. He is currently Chief Science Officer of Hong Kong financial prediction firm Aidyia Holdings, Chief Executive Officer of Novamente LLC, a privately held software company, and Chairman of the Board of the OpenCog Foundation. The latter two entities work toward the development of Artificial General Intelligence. Goertzel is also the CEO of Biomind LLC, a company that provides AI-based bioinformatics services. He is Vice Chair of futurist organization Humanity+ and he is an advisor to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and formerly its Director of Research. He divides his time between residences in Hong Kong, and Rockville Maryland (USA).

Goertzel is the son of Ted Goertzel, a professor of sociology at Rutgers University. He left high school after the tenth grade to attend Bard College at Simon's Rock, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in mathematics. Goertzel went on to obtain a Ph.D. in mathematics from Temple University in 1989, then taught mathematics, computer science and psychology at various universities, including the University of Nevada, City University of New York, the University of Waikato, and the University 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 and The New York Times, explaining the approach as machine learning combined with natural 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. 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 as Second Life to produce a more powerful intelligence. 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 a neural network. Several algorithms operate on this network, the central one being a combination of a probabilistic inference engine and a custom version of evolutionary programming. 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, Goertzel stated that he is a founding member of the transhumanist Order of Cosmic Engineers and 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 OpenCog project which aims to build an open source general artificial intelligence engine. In, 1996 Goertzel together with Francis Heylighen founded the Global Brain Group to study the global brain emerging from an increasingly intelligent Internet, and in 2011 he joined the scientific board of the newly founded Global Brain Institute at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

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. Ted in turn is son of Victor and Mildred Goertzel and Ted credits his parents also as co-authors of the Pauling biography.
• 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 Wang

See also

• Whole brain emulation

External links

• Ben Goertzel's web site and blog
• Ben Goertzel's Machines Like Us interview
• Artificial Intelligence and Human Immortality, video of Ben Goertzel presentation at the Immortality Institute conference, 17 May 2006
• Google Tech Talk by Ben Goertzel, 30 May 2007
• Interview of Ben Goertzel, by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
• Nine Years to a Positive Singularity – If We Really, Really Try. Speech given by Ben Goertzel at the Singularity Summit in September 2007
• Using Virtual Agents and Physical Robots for AGI Research. A Talk given by Ben Goertzel at The Third Conference on Artificial General Intelligence in March 2010 in Lugano Switzerland
• A General Intelligence Oriented Architecture for Embodied Natural Language Processing. A Talk given by Ben Goertzel at The Third Conference on Artificial General Intelligence in March 2010 in Lugano Switzerland
• Video interview with Ben Goertzel. Ben was interviewed during May 2011 about AGI, open cog and new book 'Building Better Minds'