Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence

Team

President

Michael Vassar is SIAI's President, and provides overall leadership of the SIAI as it develops its research capabilities and its role as a forum for discussion of the challenges and potential of artificial general intelligence. He is also responsible for the organization of the Singularity Summit. Previously, he was a Founder and Chief Strategist at SirGroovy.com, an online music licensing firm. Prior to that, he held positions with Aon, the Peace Corps, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Michael has been writing and speaking on topics related to the safe development of disruptive technologies for a number of years: his papers include the Lifeboat Foundation analysis of the risks of advanced molecular manufacturing co-authored with Robert Freitas, and "Corporate Cornucopia", authored for the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology Task Force. He holds an M.B.A. and a B.S. in biochemistry.

Email: mvassar(at)singinst(dot)org

Singularity Summit Co-Founder

Ray Kurzweil, CEO of Kurzweil Technologies, has been described as "the restless genius" by the Wall Street Journal, and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes. Inc. Magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the "rightful heir to Thomas Edison," and PBS included him as one of the 16 "revolutionaries who made America," along with other inventors of the past two centuries. As one of the leading inventors of our time, Ray has worked in such areas as music synthesis, speech and character recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, and cybernetic art. He was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. All of these pioneering technologies continue today as market leaders. His website, KurzweilAI.net, has over one million readers. Among his many honors, he is the recipient of the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize, the world's largest for innovation. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton. In 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame , established by the US Patent Office. Ray has also received twelve honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents. His books include The Age of Intelligent Machines, The Age of Spiritual Machines, and Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. Three of his books have been national best sellers. His latest best-selling book, published by Viking Press, is The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.

Chairman, Board of Directors

Edwin Evans is the Chairman of the Singularity Institute Board of Directors and the Co-Founder of Quinly Inc., a developer of applications for social networks and mobile platforms. Prior to starting Quinly, Edwin was employed as a Senior Software Engineer at Motorola, KLA-Tencor, and Aveo. Edwin is also a co-sponsor of the 2010 Singularity Research Challenge. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University.

Research Fellow

Eliezer Yudkowsky is the foremost researcher on Friendly AI and recursive self-improvement. He created the Friendly AI approach to AGI, which emphasizes the importance of the structure of an ethical optimization process and its supergoal, in contrast to the common trend of seeking the right fixed enumeration of ethical rules a moral agent should follow. In 2001, he published the first technical analysis of motivationally stable goal systems, with his book-length Creating Friendly AI: The Analysis and Design of Benevolent Goal Architectures. In 2002, he wrote "Levels of Organization in General Intelligence," a paper on the evolutionary psychology of human general intelligence, published in the edited volume Artificial General Intelligence (Springer, 2006). He has two papers in the edited volume Global Catastrophic Risks (Oxford, 2008), "Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks" and "AI as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk."

Email: sentience(at)pobox(dot)com

Research Fellow

Anna Salamon is a full-time SIAI researcher who leads the 2009 SIAI Visiting Fellows Program. She joined SIAI in 2008, working on the Uncertain Future web project, a probabilistic model of future possibilities in AI, cognitive enhancement, and catastrophic risk. Ms. Salamon holds a degree in mathematics from UC Santa Barbara and a degree in Great Books from St. John's College. She has worked for two years in applied mathematics for a variety of institutions, including research at NASA Ames into the foundations of machine learning. At the Singularity Summit 2009, she gave two talks on SIAI's mission and views.

Email: anna.salamon(at)singinst(dot)org

Research Fellow

Steve Rayhawk is a full-time SIAI researcher who is interested in applying computational Bayesian decision theory to problems in technological forecasting, risk management policy, and social epistemology. He holds a degree from the mathematics program of the UC Santa Barbara College of Creative Studies. Before joining SIAI, he worked for four years at San Diego State University on statistical methods for the application of high-throughput bioinformatics to microbial ecology. He is working on identifying and projecting the development of technologies relevant to Singularity scenarios.

Email: steve.rayhawk(at)singinst(dot)org

Chief Operating Officer

Amy Willey, J.D., is the Singularity Institute's Chief Operating Officer, and is responsible for institute operations and legal matters. Willey is a graduate from the New York University School of Law. She previously held a position at the Juvenile Rights Project Special Litigation Unit of the New York City Legal Aid Society, and was employed as a summer associate at Balestriere Fariello, a trials and investigations law firm. Willey holds a B.A. in Foreign Service from Alma College, where she helped found the non-profit organization Forgotten Children of Eastern Europe.

Email:amywilley(at)singinst(dot)org

Donor Relations Manager/Summit Organizer

Aruna Vassar is on SIAI's core Singularity Summit planning team and also works as our Donor Relations Manager. Holding a BS in Neuroscience and Behavior from the Columbia University, Aruna has previously worked as an investment analyst at Citigroup and at the Columbia University Medical Center. Aruna builds relationships between the Singularity Institute and media and corporate entities including the New York Academy of Sciences and Scientific American magazine. Her personal interests include yoga, tai chi, and art.

Email:aruna.vassar(at)singinst(dot)org

Media Director

Michael Anissimov is responsible for compiling, distributing, and promoting SIAI media materials including our writing, websites, and videos, and communicating the activities of SIAI to the public. Anissimov is author of Accelerating Future, a popular blog focused on science and futurism. He began his formal activism for SIAI with a talk "Accelerating Progress and the Potential Consequences of Smarter than Human Intelligence" at the Transvision 2003 conference, held at Yale University. During 2009, Anissimov played a major role in planning for the Singularity Summit, serving as co-organizer. One article by Anissimov, "The Benefits of a Successful Singularity", recently appeared on the front page of the popular website Digg. He is currently working on an extensive Singularity FAQ to explain the Singularity concept to a much wider community.

Email: manissimov(at)singinst(dot)org

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