EFTA00756577.pdf

From: Ben Goertzel To: Jeffrey Epstein <jeevacation@gmail.com> Subject: Book draft, and interesting new opportunity Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2010 20:52:33 +0000 Attachments: bookl.pdf; book2.pdf; mainform_4547_040210-1725(2)(2).pdf; NovamenteSupport_vl.doc; ITF_ApprovalLetter.pdf Hi Jeffrey, We haven't talked since you were set free -- congratulations on that ;-)) ... I'm sure you're making the most of it !! Two things... a book and an opportunity I) BOOK First, I'm steadily making progress on the book whose writing you funded last year. Attached find the current draft, which is not quite done, but close. I need to give the thing one more overall edit, and fix up some of the references and figures. But it's basically complete!!!! However, if you're going to read it, I suppose you should wait until I have a really final draft. After I edit it once more, I'm going to give it to a few AI researcher friends to review, and incorporate their comments -- that will be the final edit, then it will go off to the publisher. I have discussed the book with Springer already, and they're favorably inclined, though I don't have a contract yet (I'm not worried about that). 2) OPPORTUNITY Together with my friend Gino Yu (who is a prof at Hong Kong Polytechnic University), I got a research grant for applying OpenCog to create intelligent video game characters. This is fantastic because it will pay for 5 people to work full-time on my stuff for 2 years. And 3 of them will be able to focus on core AGI development, the other 2 dealing with the interface to the video game character and such. It's far short of what I'd really like of course, but it's a lot better than what I've had. The catch is, it's a 9-to-1 matching grant. Novamente LLC has to put in 1/10 of the money, and the Hong Kong government puts in the other 9/10. So Novamente needs to put in US $18K now, and another US $18K in September 2011. I couldn't write any salary for myself into the grant because that would have looked like money-laundering (since my company is supplying 1/10 of the funds). However, two of my existing Novamente/OpenCog collaborators are willing to move to Hong Kong to work on this. And, it seems that my salary for the next year or 2 (starting November of this year) will be covered by a US government project, funded by IARPA. Novamente got a small subcontract to Lockheed Martin, to supply spatiotemporal inference software as part of Lockheed's bit for the ICARUS project. It's not exactly what I want to be doing, and it's not going to bring us AGI, but it will pay all of my expenses and take only part of my time. So it will leave me time to supervise the Hong Kong project, via visits to HK and remotely. The problem of course is, I don't have the $18K (and neither does Novamente LLC), and I need it ASAP ;-p I can possibly cobble it together on various personal Visa cards, but that is a real drag. So I'm wondering if you'd be willing to donate all or part of the $18K? EFTA00756577 Pm happy to talk to you via phone (I'm 240 505 6518) or in person about this at any time. This is really amazing leverage, given that every dollar you put in is matched 9-to-1 by the Hong Kong government; and that the project is quite close to what I ideally want to be doing [i.e. it's not a peripheral commercial contract, it's actually a research grant for AGI in a certain context] Please think about it, and let me know thx Ben Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC CTO, Genescient Corp Adjunct Research Professor, Xiamen University, China Chairman, Humanity+ Advisor, Singularity University and Singularity Institute "When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before." EFTA00756578