Barney Pell

Founder, Powerset

Barney Pell, Ph.D., is the founder 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, he 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.

In September of 2007 he presented a talk at the Singularity Summit in San Francisco called "Pathways to Advanced General Intelligence: Architecture, Development, and Funding." There he presented a framework for comparing different approaches, in which intelligent behavior may be viewed as a combination of architecture and development, both of which can be characterized as more or less human-brain-like. Seen within this framework, one extreme strives for complete brain simulations that develop like human children, while nother extreme strives for unconstrained engineered systems that acquire knowledge through diverse methods.

He predicts that the path to AGI will be based on a much richer interplay between these two extremes, in which top-down and bottom-up approaches meet in the middle. The hybrid development path combines the benefits of both technical extremes. It also supports applications that create incremental business advantage for incremental improvements in AGI capability, thus driving business competition that accelerates the science. These applications include video games, virtual worlds, household robots, autonomous vehicles, and search.

video


SIAI interview series

video

2007 Semantic Web Conference, Natural Language and the Semantic Web
2007 Singularity Summit, Pathways to Artificial General Intelligence

transcripts

2007 Singularity Summit, "Pathways to Artificial General Intelligence"
SIAI Interview Series, "Fully Integrated Intelligent Systems"


audio

SIAI Interview Series, "Fully Integrated Intelligent Systems"
ZD Net Podcast, "Pathways to Artificial Intelligence" hosted by Dan Farber
2007 Singularity Summit, "Pathways to Advanced General Intelligence: Architecture, Development, and Funding"