ben goertzel born december 8 1966 in rio de janeiro brazil is chief scientist of financial prediction firm aidyia holdings chairman of ai software company novamente llc which is a privately held software company and bioinformatics company biomind llc which is a company that provides advanced ai for bioinformatic data analysis especially microarray and snp data chairman of the artificial general intelligence society and the opencog foundation vice chairman of futurist nonprofit humanity scientific advisor of biopharma firm genescient corp advisor to the singularity university research professor in the fujian key lab for brainlike intelligent systems at xiamen university china and general chair of the artificial general intelligence conference series an american author and researcher in the field of artificial intelligence he is an advisor to the machine intelligence research institute formerly the singularity institute and formerly its director of researchgoertzel is the son of ted goertzel a professor of sociology at rutgers university he left high school after the tenth grade to attend bard college at simons rock where he graduated with a bachelors degree in quantitative studies goertzel went on to obtain a phd in mathematics from temple university in 1989 before entering the software industry he served as a university faculty in several departments of mathematics computer science and cognitive science including the university of nevada city university of new york the university of waikato and the university of western australia presently he spends most of his time at a residence in the new territories of hong konghis research work encompasses artificial general intelligence natural language processing cognitive science data mining machine learning computational finance bioinformatics virtual worlds and gaming and other areas he has published a dozen scientific books 100 technical papers and numerous journalistic articleshe actively promotes the opencog project that he cofounded which aims to build an open source artificial general intelligence engine he is focused on creating benevolent superhuman artificial general intelligence and applying ai to areas like financial prediction bioinformatics robotics and gaming