Barney Pell

Current

• Advisor at Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
• Founder and CEO at Powerset
• Advisor at Speak With Me

• Advisor at Uvarta
• Advisor at LinkedIn
• Owner and CEO at Decision Theory (Sole Proprietorship)

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Past

• Entrepreneur In Residence at Mayfield
• Area Manager, Collaboration and Assistant Systems at NASA Ames Research Center
• Vice President, Strategy and Business Development at Whizbang! Labs

• Chief Strategist and Vice President, Business Development at StockMaster.com
• Senior Computer Scientist and Principal Investigator at NASA Ames Research Center
• PhD Student and Instructor at University of Cambridge
• Visiting Research Scientist at SRI International
• Student, Teaching Assistant and Instructor at Stanford University

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5 more...

Education

• University of Cambridge
• Stanford University

Recommended

12 people have recommended Barney

Connections

500+ connections

Industry

Computer Software

Websites

• My Website
• My Company

Barney Pell’s Summary

I’m a technology and product strategist, general manager, and AI researcher. I enjoy helping bring advanced technology and big ideas into real applications and markets that change people's lives.

My blog is: http://www.barneypell.com

I am Founder and CEO of Powerset, a startup company building a transformative consumer search engine based on breakthrough technology for natural language processing. By making search more effective and intuitive, Powerset is fundamentally changing how we search the web.

If you'd like to help us change the world with AI technology, please contact me!

Before starting Powerset, I was at Mayfield as an Entrpreneur in Residence.
Prior to Mayfield, I managed the 85-person Collaborative and Assistant Systems (CAS) R&D organization.

In a prior life as a researcher, I’ve worked on agents for game learning, fish schooling, NASA spacecraft control (my code has flown in space!), multi-media information management, and extracting information from the web.

I have been active in startup companies in operational and advisory roles for over 15 years.

Previous startups included StockMaster.com, a leading online financial content provider acquired by Red Herring in March 2000, and Whizbang! Labs, a leading innovator of web-based information extraction agents. Whizbang created Flipdog, an online recruiting site that automatically built the world's largest jobs database extracted directly from corporate website, which was acquired by Monster.com.

I also volunteer for two non-profits involved in youth development. Quest Scholars promotes educational meritocracy in America. FLI provides inspiration, guidance, and educational reform to help young people transform their passions into social and environmental solutions.

I am a natural networker. I have broad interests and enjoy meeting people and brainstorming ideas. I believe I can help make the world a better place through connecting the excellent people I know.

Barney Pell’s Specialties:

Search, speech and language processing, NLP, software agents, knowledge management, data mining, information extraction, forms processing, planning and scheduling, robotics, financial services, intelligence, government IT, interactive media, games, strategic planning, mergers and acquisition, content licensing, program management, decision analysis

Barney Pell’s Experience

• Advisor

  Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence

  (Computer Software industry)

  2007 — Present (1 year)

• Founder and CEO

  Powerset

  (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Internet industry)

  September 2005 — Present (3 years 1 month)

  Powerset is a San Francisco company building a transformative consumer search engine. Powerset's unique innovations in search are rooted in breakthrough technologies that take advantage of the structure and nuances of natural language. Using these advanced techniques, Powerset is building a large-scale search engine that breaks the confines of keyword search, enabling people to express their intent powerfully and naturally in ordinary language. By making search more effective and intuitive, Powerset is fundamentally changing how we search the web.

• Advisor

  Speak With Me

  (Consumer Electronics industry)

  June 2005 — Present (3 years 4 months)

  Speak With Me is a startup creating voice-based interfaces to music and navigation systems. I advise the company on business development and corporate strategy.

• Advisor

  Uvarta

  (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Computer Software industry)

  October 2004 — Present (4 years)

  Uvarta is a startup software company that develops copy protection and security solutions for games, storage, and wireless applications. I am helping the company with business development, marketing strategy, and recruiting.

• Advisor

  LinkedIn

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)

  July 2004 — Present (4 years 3 months)

  LinkedIn is the excellent business networking site you are currently using. As an advisor to the company, I provide ideas and feedback on technologies for data extraction and search, product strategy, and perspectives on the the product experience as a power networker.

• Owner and CEO

  Decision Theory (Sole Proprietorship)

  (Sole Proprietorship; 1-10 employees; Computer Software industry)

  August 2002 — Present (6 years 2 months)

  Decision Theory is a research and consulting company specializing in product strategy and business development for applications of advanced computer science (e.g. search, information management, natural language processing, and optimization). Customers include technology providers looking to grow their business, financial investors seeking to evaluate technology segments, and established companies looking to deploy advanced technologies in their products.

• Entrepreneur In Residence

  Mayfield

  (Partnership; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)

  March 2005 — November 2005 (9 months)

  Generate and helped evaluate potential investments in early to mid-stage companies. Focus areas included information management (advanced search and navigation, information integration, multi-modal interfaces), social software (social networks, blogs, wikis, P2P), and intelligent agents, with applications to internet search, business intelligence, ecommerce, productivity and collaboration. Formulated investment thesis on the future of search. Key role facilitating firm's investment in SNAP. Advisor to Mayfield consumer internet portfolio, including Tribe, Pluck, Snap, and BlackArrow.

• Area Manager, Collaboration and Assistant Systems

  NASA Ames Research Center

  (Government Agency; 10,001 or more employees; Defense & Space industry)

  December 2002 — March 2005 (2 years 4 months)

  R&D management for 85 person IT research organization working on topics like:
  - knowledge management
  - information integration
  - enterprise search
  - collaborative information portals
  - human-centered computing
  - work practice modeling and simulation, and
  - spoken dialog systems
  
  Customers/missions included:
  - Mars Exploration Rovers mission
  - Shuttle
  - International Space Station
  - FAA
  - Department of Homeland Security
  - NASA Astrobiology Institute
  
  Project Lead for strategic research management initiatives:
  - Systems analysis of IT research investments to enable NASA’s real-time weather prediction capabilities for 2010.
  - Introduced Decision Analysis formalism to NASA management.
  - Defined a $50M/year NASA research program in the areas of data mining, analytics, visualization, search, grid computing, and automated modeling.

• Vice President, Strategy and Business Development

  Whizbang! Labs

  (Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Computer Software industry)

  November 2000 — August 2002 (1 year 10 months)

  Managed vision and definition of overall strategy, including product and corporate strategy, for emerging provider of advanced web and text-processing software and services. 120-person, $7M/year company.
  
  Customers included Dun & Bradstreet, Thomson Financial, LexisNexis, Reed Elsevier, Monster.com and Citysearch. Partners included Google and Northernlight.

• Chief Strategist and Vice President, Business Development

  StockMaster.com

  (Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Internet industry)

  August 1998 — August 2000 (2 years 1 month)

  Managed strategy, negotiation, and implementation of partnerships for content acquisition, content distribution, and e-commerce, strategic alliances, mergers and acquisitions. Helped company grow from 5 to 70 employees and from $500,000 to $4,500,000 annual revenue in two years. Developed content co-branding (B2B2C) business from scratch into major growth category with 45 clients and run-rate of $1M within 1 year. Established and managed 20+ strategic partnerships with financial, media, and internet-related technology companies. Helped raise $5M in private equity in 2 rounds. Lead negotiator on successful acquisition of StockMaster.com by Red Herring Communications.

• Senior Computer Scientist and Principal Investigator

  NASA Ames Research Center

  (Government Agency; 1001-5000 employees; Computer Software industry)

  September 1993 — September 1998 (5 years 1 month)

  As a Principal Investigator, I conducted basic research in planning, execution, control, intelligent agents, information management, data mining, and software architecture.
  
  I was also Software Architect and a team leader for the Remote Agent (RA), the first software agent to fly onboard a deep space probe (during the NASA's Deep Space One mission). RA is widely considered one of the top achievements in the history of Artificial Intelligence and was awarded NASA's "software of the year" award in 1999.
  
  Other projects included work on a resource manager prototype being developed for future Mars rovers, communication satellite network management, agent controllers for human space exploration, and reusable launch vehicles.

• PhD Student and Instructor

  University of Cambridge

  (Educational Institution; 1001-5000 employees; Higher Education industry)

  October 1989 — August 1993 (3 years 11 months)

  PhD research in Computer Science / Artificial Intelligence. Thesis title: "Strategy Generation and Evaluation for Meta-Game Playing". Topics included game playing, search, agent architecture, machine learning, and strategy. Also instructor for Diploma in Computer Science and Master's program in Computer Speech and Language Processing.

• Visiting Research Scientist

  SRI International

  (Privately Held; 1001-5000 employees; Research industry)

  June 1987 — June 1989 (2 years 1 month)

  Member of the natural language processing research group. Wrote software for creating knowledge from text and for integrating multiple linguistic systems. Designed a discrete-event simulation of an office order-processing system and interfaced a language system to support queries, commands, and creation of rules.

• Student, Teaching Assistant and Instructor

  Stanford University

  (Educational Institution; 501-1000 employees; Higher Education industry)

  October 1986 — June 1989 (2 years 9 months)

  B.S. in Symbolic Systems, with Artificial Intelligence concentration.. Teaching assistant for advanced artificial intelligence course, and instructor for introductory computer course.

Barney Pell’s Education

• University of Cambridge

  Ph.D., Computer science, AI, 1989 — 1993

• Stanford University

  B.S., Symbolic Systems, 1986 — 1989

Additional Information

Barney Pell’s Websites:

• My Website
• My Company

Barney Pell’s Groups:

•    The Industry Standard
•    PC Forum 2005
•    Flight School 2005
•    Weekend to be Named Later
•    jaxtr user group
•    Search Marketing Expo (SMX) Sao Paulo

Barney Pell’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• career opportunities
• consulting offers
• job inquiries
• expertise requests
• business deals
• reference requests
• getting back in touch