Neil Jacobstein

Neil Jacobstein chairs the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Track at Singularity University on the NASA Research Park campus in Mountain View, California. He is a founding faculty member and former President of Singularity University. As a mediaX Distinguished Visiting Scholar, his research focuses on augmented decision systems. He Chaired AAAI’s 17th Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, and continues to review technical papers on the IAAI Technical Program Committee.

Neil has served as a technical consultant on AI research and development projects for: DARPA, NSF, NASA, NIH, EPA, DOE, the U.S. Army and Air Force, GM, Ford, Boeing, Applied Materials, NIST, and many other organizations. He was CEO of Teknowledge Corporation, a pioneering AI company, where he worked on AI applications systems for industry and government. He worked as a graduate research intern in Alan Kay’s Learning Research Group at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and was a consultant in PARC’s Software Concepts Group.

Jacobstein was appointed by the US National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to the Earth and Life Studies Committee for the period 2015-2021. Jacobstein is a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute. He has moderated many Aspen Institute seminars on the technical and ethical implications of advanced technologies. Jacobstein was appointed in 2016 to the Founding Editorial Board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) Science Robotics journal.

Jacobstein earned his B.S. degree in Environmental Sciences, Summa Cum Laude, from the University of Wisconsin, and his M.S. degree in Human Ecology from the University of Texas, under a USPHS scholarship with NASA’s Environmental Physiology Simulation Program. He spent four years doing environmental research as a Research Associate at the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Washington University and CUNY.