The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence

Advisors

Nick Bostrom, Ph.D., 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.

Peter Cheeseman, Ph.D., is a senior research scientist, whose specialization is in Artificial Intelligence, and Bayesian Inference Methods. He received his B.S. degree in Physics and Mathematics with honors from Melbourne University (Australia) in 1971, his M.Phil. in Applied Mathematics from Waikato University (New Zealand) in 1973, and his Ph.D. degree in Artificial Intelligence from Monash University (Australia) in 1979. His Ph.D thesis title was "A Problem Solving System with Learning". Dr. Cheeseman was a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia from 1978 to 1981. From 1981 to 1985, Peter performed research at SRI International in the areas of production planning, probabilistic methods for combining information, induction of probabilistic rules from data, development of a representation and procedure for spatial uncertainty estimation, and development of an information theoretic version of Bayesian estimation and its applications. In 1985 Peter began research at NASA Ames Research Center in the AI Research Branch. He now manages a small group who apply Bayesian inference methods to data analysis problems. This research has concentrated on the development of a practical general purpose automatic classification system, whose implementations are AutoClass III; AutoClass X; and AutoClass C.

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.

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.

Christine Peterson is co-founder and vice president of public policy of the Foresight Nanotech Institute, the leading nanotechnology public interest group. She writes, lectures and briefs the media on nanotechnology. She directs the Foresight Conferences on Molecular Nanotechnology and organizes the Foresight Institute Feynman Prizes. She also works with Freedom Technology Ventures, and serves on the advisory board of Alameda Capital, the International Council on Nanotechnology, California's Blue Ribbon Task Force on Nanotechnology, and the editorial advisory board of NASA's Nanotech Briefs. 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.

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.