Stephen Thaler
President and CEO, Imagination Engines, Inc.
Dr. Thaler is currently the President and CEO of Imagination Engines, Inc.
(IEI). He has held a variety of research and development positions in the
aerospace industry that have included work in the area of high-energy
lasers, nuclear weaponry, and stealth technology. His current activities
focus upon the building of synthetic neural architectures that emulate the
creative thinking processes in the human brain. In addition to numerous
scientific papers in the field of machine intelligence, he has been featured
in Scientific American and New Scientist. Recently, Thaler's technology was
spotlighted for two consecutive days as the front page story of the St.
Louis Post Dispatch.
As President and CEO of, Imagination Engines, Thaler currently supervises
the company's primary efforts in autonomous robotics, a research program
that has already yielded cybernetic systems that learn totally from scratch
and invent clever strategies to achieve their objectives. He also heads
IEI's efforts in advanced machine vision applications driven by both his
company's strategic relationship with the automotive industry and ongoing
efforts for the Department of Homeland Security.
Thaler has been an invited speaker at the Bot 2000 and 2001 conferences
staged by famed Internet guru, Marcus Zillman, as well as the World
Knowledge Forum in Seoul Korea, presenting his concept of a World Brain
based upon TCP/IP nodes converted to synthetic neurons. At the invitation of
the Secretary of Defense, Dr. Thaler has recently presented at the National
Defense Industry Association (NDIA) conference, on how his revolutionary
neural network paradigms could potentially contribute to a totally
autonomous and potentially diabolical unmanned air vehicle.