Barney Pell

I'm an AI Researcher, Technology Visionary, Product Strategist, Entrepreneur, Connector, with broad intellectual, social, athlectic and artistic interests.

Dr. Barney Pell is Technical Area Manager for the 80-person Collaborative and Assistant Systems (CAS) area within the Computational Sciences Division at NASA Ames Research Center.

In this role Dr. Pell provides technical and strategic leadership and personnel management for a 80-person research and development organization. CAS research areas include intelligent agents, software architecture, human-centered computing, search, collaborative knowledge management, distributed databases, information integration, spoken dialog systems, and semantic web. Customers/missions include Mars Exploration Rovers mission (JPL), Shuttle, International Space Station, FAA, and NASA Astrobiology Institute.

A recognized expert on Autonomous Agents and Human/Agent Interaction, Dr. Pell has published over 30 technical papers on topics related to information retrieval, knowledge management, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and scheduling systems.

Dr. Pell received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cambridge University in 1993, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and his B.S. degree in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University in 1989, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and was a National Merit Scholar.

From 1993-1998, Dr. Pell worked as a Principal Investigator and Senior Computer Scientist at NASA Ames, where he conducted advanced research and development of autonomous control software for NASA's deep space missions. Dr. Pell was the Architect for the Remote Agent and the Project Lead for the Executive component of the Remote Agent Experiment (RAX), the first intelligent executive to fly onboard and control a spacecraft (the Deep Space One mission). Remote Agent 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. Dr. Pell was also Co-Lead for the Autonomy Integrated Product Development Team for NASA’s New Millennium Program, responsible for planning and managing technology maturation and demonstration of autonomous systems technology for future use by NASA.

Dr. Pell returned to NASA in December 2002 after spending 4 years in startup companies. From 1998 to 2000, Dr. Pell was Chief Strategist and Vice-President of Business Development for StockMaster.com, a provider of internet-based stock-market analysis tools. Dr. Pell helped StockMaster.com grow from $500,000 to $5 million in revenue in 2 years, when the company was acquired by Red Herring Communications in July, 2000. From 2000 to 2002, Dr. Pell was Vice President of Strategy for Whizbang! Labs. a provider of advanced text processing and search engine software.