Hi Jeffrey, Good to hear from you -- and timely, in fact! I was planning to email you in a few weeks time, but since you've pinged me now, I'll take the opportunity to tell you now all the stuff I was going to tell you then.... There is a LOT to say, so please read to the end ;-) In case the email formatting is annoying, I've attached the same message in PDF form as well... I'll start with updates, and then move on to hopeful near-future stuff... On a personal note: I'm living in Hong Kong these days (trying to short-sell my empty house in Maryland, whose mortgage is currently badly underwater), and have moved on to my 3rd wife (a very sweet 28 year old mainland-Chinese computational linguist, about to finish her PhD). The "OpenCog for game characters" project (based at Hong Kong Polytechnic University) is proceeding OK. It was supposed to end January 2013, but staffing the project took longer than expected, so there's extra $$ in the project account and we will probably be able to get it extended till June. As you may recall, that project was funded 9/10 by the Hong Kong government (specifically the ITF "Innovation in Technology Foundation"), and 1/10 by my consulting company Novamente LLC (which got the money indirectly from you, via your donation to the nonprofit org Humanity+). I have been working on the OpenCog AGI project part-time (as there's not enough $$ in that project's budget to pay me a salary), and there have been 4-7 people working on it full-time (some are MS or PhD students, a couple are young programmers). I'm also involved with a couple other Al-based projects here in Hong Kong that pay me money (not a lot, but enough to let me pay my kids' college tuition in the US, etc.). These other projects involve using OpenCog's machine learning software to analyze genetics data, and Hong Kong stock market data. But I go to the OpenCog AGI lab for a few hours every day, and spend a lot of time on it evenings and weekends. We have