Dr. Ben Goertzel is CEO and Chief Scientist of AI firm Novamente LLC, a company focused on creating powerfully intelligent NPC's for online games and virtual worlds. He is also CEO of bioinformatics firm Biomind LLC, and Director of Research of the nonprofit Singularity Institute for AI. Dr. Goertzel is the
originator of the OpenCog open-source AI framework, as well as the proprietary Novamente Cognition Engine AI system. A research faculty for 8 years in several universities in the US and Australasia, he remains active in the academic AI community. He was the Program Committee Chair for AGI-08, the First
Conference on Artificial General Intelligence; and is the Conference Chair for AGI-09 which will be held in March 2009 in Washington DC. He currently serves on the Board of the World Transhumanist Association. Dr. Goertzel has authored eight technical monographs in the computing and cognitive sciences, published
by leading scientific publishers, most recently Probabilistic Logic Networks (Springer, 2008); and also edited four technical volumes. He has also published over 80 research papers in journals, conferences and edited volumes, in disciplines spanning AI, mathematics, computer science, cognitive science,
philosophy of mind and bioinformatics; and has developed AI-based trading systems for hedge funds in Connecticut and San Francisco. AI software created by his teams at Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC has been used in numerous government agencies and corporations. Based in Rockville Maryland, he is
married with three children aged 18, 15 and 11; and in his spare time he writes avant-garde fiction and composes and improvises experimental keyboard music.