Research funding proposal
Hi Jeffrey,
As we discussed, here is a research funding proposal....
As you preferred not to give specific guidance on the amount of $$ to ask for, I stuck with the idea of seeking funding to hire two senior guys to add onto the OpenCog / Hanson Robotics Hong Kong project, plus a few other extras to accelerate that project (a part-time sys-admin, some new hardware, etc.)...
The price-tag of this proposal is about $480K total over 2 years. I realize this far exceeds the modest amounts of funding you've kindly provided to me before, but I figure -- "never venture, never win." .... This is what I really need to move forward with a high level of effectiveness. My current HK team is good but too junior, and I need a couple strong senior Westerners to round out the team...
I believe that with this money, by early 2015 we can almost surely produce something that will impress you enough to make you want to take the next step and invest, say, $5M or so in producing the robot toddler over an additional 3 year period...
So, at that pace, we could plausibly have the robot toddler in 2017-2018 (2013-2014 for the currently proposed project; then 3 years after that at a $1.5M/year or so burn rate ..) And from a robot toddler with commonsense understanding of its environment and the corresponding natural language constructions, to much more advanced AGI, I believe is not such a large step.... Anyway once we have a robot toddler in hand, funding will not be one of our (many) problems ;p
If the $480K is too ambitious for you, obviously any smaller amount would also be helpful. $20K would take care of the current "corporate contribution" payment for the HK government grant. $200K over 2 years would let us add one senior staff to the project, which would be very helpful, and we could then seek $$ for the other senior staff elsewhere.... (And $40 would buy me a nice dinner ... )
Depending on your level of interest, I can of course supply more details either in writing or in conversation.
The technical proposal is 11 pages long and fairly scant on scientific details.... More details on the design for the (critical)
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vision-cognition aspect are given here if you're curious:
I realize your time is scarce, so I appreciate your willingness to seriously consider this proposal!
Thanks,
Ben
Ben Goertzel, PhD
http://goertzel.org
"My humanity is a constant self-overcoming" -- Friedrich Nietzsche
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