For over fifteen years, Dr. Barney Pell, (Ph.D. Computer science, Cambridge University F1993) has pursued ground breaking technical and commercial innovation in A.I. as a researcher, research manager, business strategist and entrepreneur. He spent 2005 as Entrepreneur in Residence at Mayfield evaluating early to mid-stage IT and knowledge based companies. Before joining Mayfield, Dr. Pell worked for NASA Ames Research Center on two occasions: from 1993-1998 as Project Lead for the Executive component of the prize-winning Remote Agent Experiment; and from 2002-2005 as a Technical Area Manager responsible for research in intelligent agents, software architecture, human-centered computing, search, collaborative knowledge management, distributed databases, information integration, spoken dialog systems, and the semantic web.
 Between 1998 and 2002, Dr. Pell worked in technical start-ups serving as Chief Strategist and Vice-President of Business Development at StockMaster.com, a provider of internet-based stock-market analysis tools and later Vice President of Strategy for Whizbang! Labs, a provider of advanced text processing and search engine software. He owns Decision Theory, a research and consulting company specializing in product strategy and business development for applications of advanced computer science.