Barney Pell

Search Strategist, Microsoft

Barney Pell founded Powerset, a company developing advanced AI technologies to deliver breakthroughs in search and navigation. For over 15 years, he has pursued groundbreaking technical and commercial innovation in AI as a researcher, research manager, business strategist and entrepreneur. He spent 2005 as Entrepreneur in Residence at Mayfield evaluating early to mid-stage IT and knowledge based companies. Prior to Mayfield, he worked for NASA Ames Research Center on two occasions: from 1993-1998 as Project Lead for the Executive component of the prize-winning Remote Agent Experiment; and from 2002-2005 as Area Manager responsible for research in intelligent agents, software architecture, human-centered computing, search, collaborative knowledge management, distributed databases, spoken dialog systems, and the semantic web.

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 other 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.

In November of 2008 he participated in a panel on artificial intelligence at the Convergence 08 unconference. He is currently serving as search strategist and evangelist at Microsoft. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cambridge University.

video

Barney Pell juggling

video

2007, SIAI Video Interview
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"