Ben Goertzel is the Chief Scientist of Hanson Robotics, a Hong Kong–based robotics company that creates some of the world’s most advanced humanoid robots. He is also Chief Scientist of Aidyia Limited, a Hong Kong investment management firm that uses advanced AI for financial prediction. In addition, he serves as Chairman of the Artificial General Intelligence Society, which hosts the annual AGI research conference series, and of the OpenCog Foundation, an organization leading the international development of advanced open-source AI tools.
Dr. Goertzel is one of the world’s foremost experts in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a subfield of AI focused on creating thinking machines with general cognitive capabilities at or beyond the human level. He has decades of experience applying AI to practical challenges across domains including natural language processing, data mining, robotics, video gaming, national security, and bioinformatics.
In the field of longevity research, he has been a leading advocate and practitioner of applying AI technologies to the analysis of genomics data related to aging and lifespan. He has worked with Genescient analyzing DNA from long-lived fruit flies, and collaborated with LifeCode and MaxLife to design AI-based nutraceuticals targeting aging and age-associated diseases. Currently, he leads a team applying OpenCog AI technology to analyze the DNA of supercentenarians and other long-lived individuals.
Before relocating to Hong Kong in 2011, Dr. Goertzel held executive roles at AI consulting and product development firms in Washington, DC (CEO, Chairman, and Chief Scientist at Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC) and in New York City (CTO at Webmind Inc.). Earlier in his career, he served as faculty in mathematics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; in cognitive science at the University of Western Australia; and in computer science at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, the City University of New York, and the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
He has published nearly 20 scientific books and well over 100 peer-reviewed research papers. Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and raised primarily in the United States, Dr. Goertzel holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Temple University in Philadelphia, USA.
