Creating a thinking machine is a big job.  We believe we can handle it on our own, but it will be a lot easier with more helpers.

If we meet our objective of raising $500,000 during Summer 2001, we will be able to support around 12 employees, 2 in the US and the remainder in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.  As talented and focused as we are, this is still a small team for such a huge project

So, if you have relevant technical skills and knowledge, and are interested in donating some of your time to Webmind research, then we're happy to have your collaboration.  Please contact Ben Goertzel ASAP.

What's the minimum amount of time that you need to be willing to commit, in order make the management of your contribution worthwhile from our perspective?  8 hours per week is a figure that seems about right.  (Of course, if you have a really exceptional depth of knowledge in each area, then we might benefit from ten minutes per month of your expertise, but we'll deal with these cases as they come up!)

Currently we can use help in all sorts of ways, the following is only a partial list.

• Java programming (No amateurs please.  This code is pretty intense.)
• C programming (ditto)
• Mathematical analysis (we have some interesting calculational and foundational questions relating to computational reasoning and attention allocation)
• Mathematical logic (we need mizar.org auto-translated into KNOW, our own simpler knowledge representation format)
• Computational linguistics (we're using some open-source linguistic libraries such as XTag.  They need help.  There are also lots of funky issues to do with the interrelation between parsing and semantic analysis and generation).
• Bioinformatics (there is a variety of interesting pplications of our AI to various problems in this domain)

Please note, this is not an open-source (or open-design) project.  If you want to join the team, even part-time, you will have to sign a non-disclosure document.  We're aware that this obstructs employees of many technology firms from collaborating with us in their spare time, but that's a loss we'll have to take, at this point.  In the future we may open up more or even all of our code and designs, but not yet.

Publishing academic papers (or books) based on work done with Webmind Inc. is quite possible, but will have to be discussed on a case by case basis.  In principle we are very open to this option.

Finally, please be aware that infinity is not an optimal team size for this project.   If you volunteer your help, it's possible that we'll decide we can't productively use you at the moment.  This doesn't mean that we don't like you or don't respect your qualifications.  It means we'll contact you again when the project has a real use for your skills and knowledge.  We don't want to waste anyone's valuable efforts.