TheSmartCity.Blog Podcast’s Next Guest is AI Expert, Entrepreneur and Investor, Barney Pell

Barney is an active start-up investor and advisor with over 200 investments. He enjoys helping bring advanced technology and big ideas into real applications and markets that change people’s lives.

He is currently a Fellow in the Creative Destruction Laboratory, one of the world’s top start-up accelerators, an angel investor and VC with his own fund and syndicate, World Changing Ventures, and Venture Partner at Radical Ventures. He also serves as a board member or advisor to world-changing startups including: Streamlit, Ecoation, and Ionomr.

Barney has been active in startup companies as founder, executive and advisory roles for over 20 years.

He was the Founder and CEO of Powerset, a natural language search engine that Microsoft acquired. He then stayed on with Microsoft as a search strategist and evangelist for Bing, Microsoft’s new consumer search engine, and later as an architect and general manager for Bing’s Local/Mobile Search team. While at Microsoft, he led the company’s long-range planning for semantics and knowledge and co-founded Bing’s Knowledge Graph and Cortana, Microsoft’s conversational assistant. Before starting Powerset, he was at Mayfield VC as an Entrepreneur in Residence.

Barney was also the co-founder of Moon Express, a start-up developing a commercial lunar lander; LocoMobi, a leader in smart cities and intelligent transportation systems, and Associate Founder of Singularity University.

He was a founding investor and then Chairman of the Science Advisory Board for Figure Eight, a leader in human-in-the-loop machine learning, until successful acquisition by Appen and an early advisor to LinkedIn.

Earlier startups included StockMaster.com, a leading online financial content provider and Whizbang! Labs, a leading innovator of web-based information extraction agents. He has also been a long-time AI research leader and managed an 85-person AI R&D organization at NASA. Highlights included flying the first AI system in deep space (on the Deep Space One mission), the first spoken dialog system in space, and supporting the Mars Exploration Rovers mission.

Specialties: AI, Machine Learning, NLP, search, e-Commerce, software agents, knowledge management, data mining, information extraction, forms processing, planning and scheduling, robotics, space exploration, financial services, intelligence, government IT, strategic planning, mergers and acquisition, decision analysis, Parking, Space.