FAQ About Engaging w/ Me in Some Way

If you don’t already know me personally or professionally but you’re interested in contacting me about engaging w/ me in some way, please read this page first! I like engaging w/ people when it’s useful but I’m really busy so I prefer to minimize unproductive interactions insofar as I can….

Speaking requests

If you would like arrange a speaking engagement, please email me with the particulars and ask.

Time permitting (a big if), I’ll generally speak to nonprofit or university groups without compensation except travel costs. (Note, I’m nominally based near Washington DC, though I seem to be traveling much of the time these days.)

Business Opportunities

If you have a serious business opportunity for Novamente LLC or Biomind LLC, you can email me personally; or if that doesn’t get an answer (because it slips past me in my overfull inbox), please email the relevant addresses for those firms, info@novamente.net or info@biomind.net

Job-Seekers

Check out the OpenCog, Novamente or Biomind websites for relevant job opportunities.  If there’s nothing listed there right now, then contacting me personally isn’t likely to unearth any hidden, currently operative opportunities.  However, if you have a strong AI background and AGI interest, and would like to be kept in mind for future positions in the above enterprises as they  may unfold, feel free to send me your resume’ for future consideration.

If you want to volunteer to help with OpenCog or other futurist endeavors

If you’re a programmer or computer scientist and want to help with OpenCog, send an email to the OpenCog email list.

To volunteer to help with futurist-oriented work in other ways, contact Humanity+ as specified on that organization’s volunteer page.

If you’re a student and want to pursue graduate study in AGI

Unfortunately I probably won’t be that much direct use to you, since I’m not affiliated with any university right now except as an adjunct research faculty.

If you’re in China or Hong Kong, email me and I can put you in touch with my contacts at Xiamen U or HK Poly U.

If you’re in Europe, Juergen Schmidhuber’s group at ISDIA is one option; working with Joscha Bach in Berlin is another.

If you’re in Australia and like math, try Marcus Hutter.

In the US, you might want to consider some AI labs like RPI (Ron Sun or Nick Cassimatis), Itamar Arel at UTK, Stan Franklin at U. Memphis, Pei Wang at Temple, Paul Rosenbloom at USC, the well-known SOAR or ACT-R labs, etc.

There are no university programs that I know of teaching AGI per se, but the above are some places where there are good individual researchers doing AI research (and supervising grad students) with an explicit AGI objective. (The above list is by no means complete and was generated by me randomly in about 30 seconds, and is highly biased to folks I know personally.)

If you have an amazingly great idea for AGI or some other radical technology or whatever, and need funding

Please be aware, I do not have a lot of money to invest in, or donate to, your idea! The truth is, I’m continually struggling to find money from various sources to fund work on OpenCog. And the wealthy individuals and institutions I know are already overwhelmed with folks touting various great ideas.

If you want to recruit funding for your idea, what you probably need is a compelling practical demonstration to show off. Without that, it’s quite hard — and getting in front of rich or influential people to tout your idea probably isn’t going to help. However, there are always exceptions to every rule and it’s true that a sufficiently compelling description of a sufficiently great idea could potentially elicit funding from wealthy individuals or institutions (a category to which I do not belong, personally).

Anyway if you have an idea you’d like to share with me, please use email as the communication medium with which to do so! It’s always possible I’ll be able to help you out in some way, perhaps by connecting you with someone else who can be directly useful.

If you have a cool idea to discuss…

Feel free to send me an email, but please make it a short one initially, because it’s quite possible I won’t find time to respond.   Some weeks I respond to all my emails; other times I end up treating my inbox more like a Twitter feed!  ….  If I don’t reply after a week or two, feel free to try again.