From: Ben Goertzel To: Jeffrey Epstein <[email protected]> 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 w