Barney Pell

Barney Pell, Ph.D. is a leading entrepreneur, investor and advisor in Al and deep technology companies.
He is a Founding Fellow in the Creative Destruction Lab’s Machine Learning Track, in which he mentors hundreds of Al startups each year; Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board of Figure 8, the leading Human-in-the-Loop Al platform, Board Director for Ecaotion, an Al and Robotics startup for greenhouse agriculture; and Founder of Moon Express, a startup company building a lunar lander to open up Deep Space for commercial development.
He was Founder and CEO of Powerset, a pioneering startup in natural-language search that was acquired by Microsoft, where he then served as Strategist of Bing, lead for Bing’s local and mobile search team, leader of Microsoft’s long-range plan for semantics and knowledge, and initiated the projects that became Satori, Microsoft’s knowledge graph, and Cortana, Microsoft’s conversational assistant. He has worked in R&D at NASA, where he helped put the first Al system in deep space, and at SRI, Stanford and at Cambridge University, where his Ph.D. research pioneered the field of general game playing in Al.