Dr. Ben Goertzel is a highly influential figure in the fields of artificial intelligence, robotics, and computational finance. Born in 1966, he was reading his grandfather’s physics books at just two years old and has been a pioneering force in AI, researching its capabilities since the 1980s. Dr Goertzel has dedicated his career to both the theoretical and practical applications of AI, striving to bridge the gap between machine intelligence and human-like cognition. He helped popularize the term “artificial general intelligence” and is considered the ‘founding father of AGI’.

Dr. Goertzel leads the SingularityNET Foundation, the enterprise AI firm TrueAGI, the OpenCog Foundation, and the AGI Society. Additionally, he is the facilitator of the Artificial General Intelligence conference, held annually for more than fifteen years.

He chairs the futurist nonprofit Humanity+, serves as Chief Scientist of AI firms Rejuve.ai, Mindplex, Cogito, and Jam Galaxy, all parts of the SingularityNET ecosystem, and serves as keyboardist and vocalist in the Desdemona’s Dream Band, the first-ever band led by an AI powered humanoid robot. When Dr Goertzel was Chief Scientist of the robotics firm Hanson Robotics, he led the software team behind the creation of Sophia robot; and as Chief AI Scientist of Awakening Health, he is leading the team crafting the mind behind the world's foremost nursing assistant robot, Grace. He introduced the term and concept "AGI" in his 2005 book "Artificial General Intelligence” and his research work encompasses multiple areas including Artificial General Intelligence, natural language processing, cognitive science, machine learning, computational finance, bioinformatics, virtual worlds, gaming, parapsychology, theoretical physics, and more. His recent focus is on the creation of AGI - having developed the OpenCog Hyperon project, a cross-paradigm AGI architecture incorporating logic systems, evolutionary learning, neural nets and other methods, designed for decentralized implementation on SingularityNET and associated blockchain based tools like HyperCycle and NuNet.

He has published 25+ scientific books, ~150 technical papers, and numerous journalistic articles, and given talks at a vast number of events of all sorts around the globe.

Before entering the software industry, he obtained a Ph.D. in mathematics from Temple University in 1989 and served as a university faculty in several departments of mathematics, computer science, and cognitive science, in the US, Australia, and New Zealand.