Singularity Institute

Advisors

Peter Thiel is founder and president of Clarium, a San Francisco-based hedge fund. He is also a founding partner of The Founder's Fund, a VC firm with early-stage investments in Facebook, LinkedIn, Rapleaf, IronPort, and Powerset, among other startups. Thiel was the initial investor in Facebook, and serves on the company's board of directors. Before Clarium, he was co-founder, chairman and CEO of PayPal, which was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. Prior to PayPal, he ran Thiel Capital Management, the Menlo Park-based predecessor to Clarium, which began with $1 million under management in the fall of 1996. Thiel began his financial career as a derivatives trader at CS Financial Products, after he practiced securities law at Sullivan & Cromwell. He is also active in philanthropic and educational pursuits, sitting on the board of directors of the Pacific Research Institute and the board of visitors of Stanford Law School.

Professor Max Tegmark, a native of Stockholm, left Sweden in 1990 after receiving his B.Sc. in Physics from the Royal Institute of Technology (he'd earned a B.A. in Economics the previous year at the Stockholm School of Economics). His first academic venture beyond Scandinavia brought him to California, where he studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley, earning his M.A. in 1992, and Ph.D. in 1994. After four years of west coast living, Tegmark returned to Europe and accepted an appointment as a research associate with the Max-Planck-Institut fĂźr Physik in Munich. In 1996 he headed back to the U.S. as a Hubble Fellow and member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Dr. Tegmark remained in New Jersey for a few years until an opportunity arrived to experience the urban northeast with an Assistant Professorship at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received tenure in 2003. He extended the east coast experiment and moved north of Philly to the shores of the Charles River (Cambridge-side), arriving at MIT in September 2004. Dr. Tegmark has received numerous awards for his research, including a Packard Fellowship (2001-06), Cottrell Scholar Award (2002-07), and an NSF Career grant (2002-07). His work with the SDSS collaboration on galaxy clustering shared the first prize in Science magazine's "Breakthrough of the Year: 2003."

Professor Nick Bostrom is the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. His research covers issues in the foundations of probability theory, global catastrophic risk, ethics of human enhancement, and consequences of potential future technologies such as AI and nanotechnology, and related areas. He has published more than 100 articles, including papers in journals such as Nature, Journal of Philosophy, Ethics, Bioethics, Mind, Journal of Medical Ethics, and Astrophysics & Space Science. He is the author of one monograph, Anthropic Bias (Routledge), and co-editor of two forthcoming volumes (Oxford University Press). His writings have been translated into more than 15 languages. Bostrom has a background in physics and computational neuroscience as well as philosophy. Before moving to Oxford, he taught philosophy at Yale University. He is also a former British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. He worked briefly as an expert consultant for the European Commission in Brussels and for the CIA in Washington DC. Bostrom is a frequently sought commentator in the media, with nearly 200 interviews for television, radio, and print media.

Robert V. Brazell is the Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Partner of Talos Partners. He was the founder and founding board member of Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK) and also served as the company's president and chief executive officer. Brazell has been the investor and owner of several Internet properties including eHow.com (www.ehow.com), a content and search site; Delphi.com (www.delphiforums.com), the Internet's first discussion group community; and Sandbox.com (www.sandbox.com), the Internet's largest fantasy sports site. He was also the controlling owner and chairman of the board of data tracking companies Live Global Bid (www.liveglobalbid.com) and VinIQ (www.viniq.com). Brazell currently serves as Chairman of In-store Broadcasting Network (IBN), www.ibnads.com; the world's largest retail media company and InTouch"„˘ Media, an interactive digital retail media company. Brazell has raised and invested more than $200 million in the past ten years. He is the co-author of "The Idea Economy"TM and has authored a second book due for release in the fall of 2011. He also served on the board of directors of the Deseret Foundation, an organization that provides predictable surgical care to children in 12 countries and establishes self-sufficient infrastructure in these countries.

Christine Peterson is Co-Founder and Past President of Foresight Institute, the leading nanotechnology public interest group. She writes, lectures and briefs the media on nanotechnology and life extension. She organized the Foresight Conferences on Molecular Nanotechnology and the Foresight Institute Feynman Prizes. She chairs the Personalized Life Extension Conference series, serves on the advisory board of the International Council on Nanotechnology and the editorial advisory board of NASA's Nanotech Briefs, and coined the term 'open source software'. In 1992, with K. Eric Drexler and Gayle Pergamit, she wrote Unbounding the Future: The Nanotechnology Revolution, and coauthored Leaping the Abyss: Putting Group Genius to Work with Gayle Pergamit.

Ben Goertzel, Ph.D., is an AGI researcher with Novamente LLC. He has over 70 publications, concentrating on cognitive science and AI, including Chaotic Logic, Creating Internet Intelligence, Artificial General Intelligence (edited with Cassio Pennachin), and The Hidden Pattern. He is chief science officer and acting CEO of Novamente, a software company aimed at creating applications in the area of natural language question-answering. He also oversees Biomind, an AI and bioinformatics firm that licenses software for bioinformatics data analysis to the NIH's National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases and CDC. Previously, he was founder and CTO of Webmind, a 120+ employee thinking-machine company. He has a Ph.D. in mathematics from Temple University, and has held several university positions in mathematics, computer science, and psychology, in the US, New Zealand, and Australia.

Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D., co-founded with David Gobel the Methuselah Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in Springfield, Virginia. He is working to expedite the development of a cure for human aging, a medical goal he refers to as engineered negligible senescence. To this end, he has identified what he concludes are the seven areas of the aging process that need to be addressed medically before this can be done. De Grey has over 60 publications in 25 peer-reviewed journals. He argues that the fundamental knowledge necessary to develop effective anti-aging medicine mostly exists today, and that the science is actually ahead of the funding. He works to identify and promote specific technological approaches to the reversal of different aspects of aging, centering around a detailed plan that he has created, Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS). He has been interviewed in recent years in many news sources, including CBS 60 Minutes, BBC, the New York Times, Fortune Magazine, and Popular Science. His main activities at present are as chairman and chief science officer of the Methuselah Foundation and editor-in-chief of the academic journal Rejuvenation Research. He lives with his wife in Cambridge, UK.

Neil Jacobstein is chairman and CEO of Teknowledge Corporation, a 25-year old software company. He has served as a technical consultant on software research and development projects for NSF, DARPA, NASA, NIH, EPA, DOE, the U.S. Army and Air Force, GM, Ford, Boeing, Applied Materials, and other agencies. In 1999, he co-chaired the American Association for Artificial Intelligence's 16th Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, and chaired the 17th IAAI Conference in 2005. Since 1992, he has served as chairman of the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, a not-for-profit research group focused on the long-term feasibility, embedded safeguards, and applications of molecular manufacturing. Jacobstein was the leading co-author of the Foresight Guidelines for Responsible Nanotechnology Development.

Stephen Omohundro, Ph.D. has had a wide-ranging career as a scientist, university professor, author, software architect, and entrepreneur. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford with Honors and Distinction in Physics and with Distinction in Mathematics. He received a Ph.D. in Physics from UC Berkeley, and published Geometric Perturbation Theory in Physics based on his thesis. At Thinking Machines Corporation, he co-developed Star Lisp, the programming language for the massively parallel Connection Machine. He was a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana where he co-founded the Center for Complex Systems Research. He wrote the three-dimensional graphics portion of Wolfram Research's Mathematica program as one of the original seven developers. At the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, he led an international team in developing the object-oriented programming language Sather. He also developed a variety of novel neural network techniques and machine learning algorithms and built systems which learned to read lips, control robots, and learn grammars. At the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, he worked on a variety of applications of AI and co-authored a patent on the PicHunter image database retrieval system. He founded Olo Software in Palo Alto to provide technology and business consulting to a variety of startups and research labs, including InterTrust Technologies, Xerox PARC, Fuji-Xerox PAL, Ask Jeeves Inc., VideoScribe, LinuxMatix, Video Memoirs, and Molecular Objects. He is the founder and president of Self-Aware Systems, founded to develop a new kind of software that programs itself.

Director of Venture Development

Pejman Makhfi engages with investment communities on behalf of SIAI, and advises researchers and entrepreneurs to help them develop new ventures. He is a Silicon Valley technology veteran, entrepreneur, and investor, with more than fifteen years of experience consulting entrepreneurs, technology investors, and forward-thinking startups. He is founder and managing director of Venture Choice, a private angel group. He is widely recognized as a leader in the field of business process automation and knowledge modeling, and served as the key architect for several award-winning leaders in the software and financial industries, including FinancialCircuit and Savvion. Pejman holds a B.S./M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Dortmund in Germany. He has authored multiple patents and standards, and is a contributor to IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and American Society for Quality.

Email: pejman(at)singinst(dot)org

Barney Pell, Ph.D., is founder and CEO of Powerset, a stealth-stage startup developing advanced AI technologies to deliver breakthroughs in search and navigation. He is owner of Decision Theory, a research and consulting company specializing in product strategy and business development for applications of advanced computer science, including search, information management, natural language processing, and optimization. Prior to Powerset, Pell was an entrepreneur in residence at Mayfield, a VC firm in Silicon Valley. In this role, he generated and helped evaluate potential investments in early to mid-stage companies. Prior to joining Mayfield, he was technical area manager for the 80-person collaborative and assistant systems (CAS) area within the Computational Sciences Division at NASA Ames Research Center. A recognized expert on autonomous agents and human/agent interaction, he has published over 30 papers on topics related to information retrieval, knowledge management, machine learning, AI, and scheduling systems.