Ben Goertzel

Who is Ben Goertzel?

Ben Goertzel is Chief Scientist of financial prediction firm Aidyia Holdings; Chairman of AI software company Novamente LLC, which is a privately held software company, and bioinformatics company Biomind LLC, which is a company that provides advanced AI for bioinformatic data analysis; Chairman of the Artificial General Intelligence Society and the OpenCog Foundation; Vice Chairman of futurist nonprofit Humanity+; Scientific Advisor of biopharma firm Genescient Corp.; Advisor to the Singularity University and Singularity Institute; Research Professor in the Fujian Key Lab for Brain-Like Intelligent Systems at Xiamen University, China; and general Chair of the Artificial General Intelligence conference series, an American author and researcher in the field of artificial intelligence. He is an advisor to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and formerly its Director of Research.

Goertzel is the son of Ted Goertzel, a professor of sociology at Rutgers University. He left high school after the tenth grade to attend Bard College at Simon's Rock, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in mathematics. Goertzel went on to obtain a Ph.D. in mathematics from Temple University in 1989. Before entering the software industry, he served as a university faculty in several departments of mathematics, computer science and cognitive science, including the University of Nevada, City University of New York, the University of Waikato, and the University of Western Australia. Presently, he divides most of his time between residences in Hong Kong, and Rockville, Maryland.