Barney Pell

Barney Pell, Ph.D. is a technology innovator, entrepreneur, angel investor and advisor. He is Founder of Decision Theory, an incubator, advisory and investment firm focused on artificial intelligence and decision science strategy and technologies for small and large companies; Co-Founder and Chairman of LocoMobi, a startup company bringing cloud and AI technology to the parking industry; Co-Founder and Vice Chairman of Moon Express, a startup company building a lunar lander robot to open up the Moon for commercial development; a Machine Learning Fellow at the Creative Disruption Lab at the University of Toronto, advising 25 early stage machine learning and AI startup companies; and also an Associate Founder and serves on the board of trustees for Singularity University. He was Founder and CEO of Powerset, a pioneering startup in natural-language search that was acquired by Microsoft, where he then served as Strategist and Architect of Bing, lead for B ing's local and mobile search team, leader of Microsoft's long-range plan for semantics and knowledge, and co-founder of Cortana, Microsoft's conversational assistant. He previously managed an 85-person Artificial Intelligence R&D organization at NASA. Highlights included flying the first AI system in deep space (on the Deep Space One mission), the first spoken dialog system in space, and supporting the Mars Exploration Rovers mission. He completed his B.S. in Symbolic Systems at Stanford University and his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Trinity College, Cambridge, in which he researched artificial intelligence, machine learning, and general-game playing as a path toward artificial general intelligence.