Barney Pell

Dr. Barney Pell is currently Founder and CEO of Powerset, a San-Francisco startup company that is building a search engine based on natural language processing technology.

Prior to founding Powerset, Barney was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Mayfield, a Venture Capital Firm based in Silicon Valley. In this role, Dr. Pell generated and helped evaluate potential investments in early to mid-stage companies. Focus areas included information management (advanced search and navigation, information integration, multi-modal interfaces), social software (social networks, blogs, wikis, P2P), and intelligent agents, with applications to internet search, business intelligence, ecommerce, productivity and collaboration. Dr. Pell formulated an investment thesis on the future of search and played a key role facilitating the firm's investment in SNAP. Dr. Pell was also an Advisor to Mayfield's consumer internet portfolio, including Tribe, Pluck, Snap, and BlackArrow.

Prior to joining Mayfield, Barney was 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 provided technical and strategic leadership and personnel management for an 80-person research and development organization called Collaborative Assistant Systems (CAS). 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.