EFTA00868906.pdf

From: To: "jeffrey E." <[email protected]> Cc: Tyler Shears <1 Subject: Re: Dear Mr. Epstein Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 12:16:57 +0000 Hi Jeffrey, Thanks for this. I'll look into it today. Ben Goertzel will review my Al piece- I'll send you a copy. Seth is reviewing the quantum. I'd like to have a 3rd done before Tyler and I meet with you on the 24th. Ma' On Oct 16, 2014, at 9:44 PM, "jeffrey E." <jeevacationggmail.com> wrote: Forwarded message From: VelaSusan Park <=l Date: Thursday, October 16, 2014 Subject: Dear Mr. Epstein To: jeevacation(ii;gmail.com, jeffreyj Dear Mr. Epstein, I hope this letter finds you well. My name is VelaSusan Park, and I'm the Vice President and the new host of NEURO.tv for Season 2. I am writing to report on the progress of NEURO.tv for this past year, which we owe in large part to your donation and the participation of the 174 backers of our Kickstarter campaign last November. We have ambitious plans to expand NEURO.tv into an uncharted territory. JF is telling me that he is finalizing our trailers and will send you a separate email in a couple of days, containing also links to our currently published episodes. EFTA00868906 To give a little bit of background about myself, I am a student entrepreneur who has founded my own software start-up that utilizes artificial intelligence to analyze economic markets. I am currently pursuing my JD and Masters in Entrepreneurship at Duke Law School. I graduated with honors and distinction in major in Political Science at Yale University in 2013, and I worked at a patent law firm in Santa Monica for a year after that. My senior thesis was on the impact of media and technology on North Korean human rights, in which I interviewed Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, along with many distinguished scholars at several top universities in the U.S. My start-up, OpTix Group, was funded by the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute (YEI), and my team was one of twelve teams that won the 2012 YEI Summer Fellowship. I am an expert in artificial intelligence, and I have worked with many computer science PhDs at Yale University to develop patent-pending software for my start-up. I am also a published author, an accomplished dancer, and a polyglot who can read, write, and speak seven languages. I believe that my experience in artificial intelligence as well as my passion for the academia will make me the perfect person to break down the difficult language of neuroscience to a wider audience, and take NEURO.tv to the next level. Here are NEURO.tv updates for the past year: Guests NEURO.tv has received guests who are nothing less than the top active neuroscientists and philosophers alive, and two of our previous guests, May-Britt and Edvard Moser, were awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Medicine. All of our guests have enjoyed having the opportunity to explain their research to a large audience. Most of these scientists were not used to relations with the media and for many of them, it was their first experience in communicating directly to a crowd of non-specialists. By bringing them to the Internet, we have created an environment where they can feel safe in talking to the public in an open and accessible forum. Our guests include: Edvard and May-Britt Moser, Professors and Directors of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, NTNU Nicholas C. Spitzer, Distinguished Professor, Biological Sciences, UCSD EFTA00868907 Erin C. Mckiernan, Postdoctoral Researcher in Public Health at the National Institute of Public Health of Mexico Nita A. Farahany, Professor of Law and Philosophy, Duke University Hank Greely, Director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences and Professor of Genetics, Stanford School of Medicine, Stanford University Jeffrey D. Schell, E. Bronson Ingram Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Center for Integrative Cognition & Cognitive Neuroscience and the Vanderbilt Vision Research Center, Vanderbilt University Kenneth S. Kosik, Harriman Professor of Neurosciences, UCSB Katherine L. Bryant, Ph. D. student at Emory University Antonello Bonci, Scientific Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, NIH Dale Purves, Geller Professor of Neurobiology at Duke and author of the authoritative book "Neuroscience" Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Chauncey Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics, Duke Gordon Arbuthnott, Professor at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Joshua D. Greene, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard and author of the book "Moral Tribes" Kay Tye, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience, MIT EFTA00868908 Nita Farahany, Professor of Law and Philosophy, Duke Michael L. Platt, Director of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, Duke Marguerite Matthews, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Oregon Health & Science University Micah Allen, Wellcome Trust Post-Doctoral Fellow, University College London Felipe de Brigard, Assistant Professor at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke David L. Barrack, Postdoctoral researcher and Ph. D. in Philosophy and Neuroscience, Duke Hermina Nedelescu and Mohamed Abdelhack, JSPS research fellow and graduate student, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Public support Many of the most respected modern scientists and psychologists have publicly acclaimed NEURO.tv's contribution to public education, including most of our guests as well as: David A. Pizarro, Associate Professor, Cornell University Steven Pinker, Harvard College Professor, Harvard Matthew Rushworth, Research Fellow, University of Oxford EFTA00868909 Sebastian Seung, Professor of Computational Neuroscience, MIT Xuelai Fan, Graduate student, University of British Columbia Kate Fehlhaber, Graduate student, UCLA Adam J. Calhoun, Postdoctoral researcher, UCSD Steve Chang, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Yale James McNamara, Duke School of Medicine Professor of Neuroscience, Duke Edward H. Koo, Professor at the School of Medicine, UCSD Ann M. Graybiel, Professor at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT Karine Fenelon, Assistant Professor, University of Texas El Paso Claire O'Connell, MITx fellow and Education Director of EyeWire Allan Basbaum, Professor and Chair of the Department of Anatomy, UCSF Media coverage Our initiative has brought a lot of media attention, including coverage by academic blogs and newspapers such as the Richard Dawkins Foundation blog, The Duke Chronicle, Philosophy EFTA00868910 of Brains, Knowing Neurons, the On Your Mind Podcast, the Very Bad Wizards podcast, the NeuroEcology blog, the NTNU Medecine Blog, Neuroexia and The London School of Economics and Political Science Blog. We have also written an article in the peer-reviewed literature about the NEURO.tv experience, which was published at MJMS. Importantly, our main publishing outlet, the BrainFacts.org blog, supported by the Kavli Foundation, the Gatsby Foundation and the Society for Neuroscience is extremely pleased with the product and the main academic editor of the website, Nicholas Spitzer, has assured me that he is looking forward to continue publishing our episodes. He was extremely grateful and happy to learn that we had secured funding from your foundation given the small budget on which BrainFacts.orgBrainFacts.org is operating. Your foundation as well as our Kickstarter backers are thanked in every credits section of our show, as well as in the introduction of Episode 6. Volunteers NEURO.tv's work relies on a team of highly-devoted volunteers that include: Me, VelaSusan Park, JO/LLM in Entrepreneurship student at Duke Law School Jean-Francois Gariepy, Postdoctoral researcher at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, Duke Diana L. Xie, Ph. D. student, Duke Leanne Boucher, Associate Professor, Nova Southeastern University John L. Kubie, Associate Professor at the Department of Cell Biology, SUNY Downstate Medical Center Steven L. Miller, Graduate student, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences EFTA00868911 Publishing of the episodes and audience A total of 13 episodes are published and the remaining 6 episodes of Season 1 will be progressively released up to January. The building of our viewership is going well, but we intend to make it better for Season 2. NEURO.tv will undergo major changes in terms of format, making it a more visually appealing and professional show, while maintaining the quality of the intellectual discussions to the current level. NEURO.tv episodes typically gather a thousand viewers on the month of their publications, and reach up to 6000 viewers after 6 months. Importantly, the quality and timelessness of the discussions give even the oldest NEURO.tv episodes a very good potential for long tail viewing. Twitter and Reddit measures of success are extremely good, and the episodes bring a good level of commenting on social networks. On YouTube, the average looking time for an episode is about 15 minutes per session of viewing, which is very high considering that the YouTube audience is typically less attentive for long periods of time. Half of our viewership is directly downloading the files on our website or on iTunes, and we have no way to tell the viewing time for this part of our audience but we receive most of our email comments from them and we know that many of them are listening to the entire episodes. Hosts NEURO.tv's goal is not only to revolutionize the way science is communicated to scientists as well as the general public. We also want to train young scientists to speak of science publicly. As you know, our host for Season 1 was Diana L. Xie, a student who had just finished her undergraduate studies in Pharmacology and was looking to gather new experiences in science and science communication before deciding her future. By welcoming her to NEURO.tv, we have provided her with an environment where she was exposed to the top neuroscientists of our time and where she had to learn how to communicate concepts in neuroscience and philosophy to the general public. Since then, she has been accepted in two of the best neuroscience schools in the country, Yale and Duke, and she will be pursuing a Ph. D. in Neuroscience at Duke where she will study the boundaries between artificial and human intelligence and how people differentiate between classes of agents ranging from simple reactive computer agents to more complex computer players and humans. She intends to publish a book in the next years on artificial intelligence, cognition and neuroscience. These results show that NEURO.tv can be used as a springboard for young scientists who can then apply what they have learned to pursue their Ph. D. studies. Importantly, it shows that the NEURO.tv model is a viable solution for emerging scientists to gain experience and interest in the broad intellectual questions that are covered on our show. EFTA00868912 Administration We have now obtained the 501(c)(3) status from the IRS, and are up-to-date in our tax reporting and accounting of expenses. Conclusion As JF pointed out in a recent article at BrainFacts.org which went quite popular (Scientists on Twitterhttp://blog.brainfacts.org/2014/07/scientists-on-twitter/) the way we do science and communicate it is changing. There is no reason why the best ideas would not have their place on the Internet, to be viewed by anyone in the places where people go for information and entertainment, like YouTube. I believe that academia is currently changing and will keep changing during the next decades and that, when we look back, initiatives like NEURO.tv will be viewed as some of the early steps in freeing the information flow between scientists and the general public. Almost every single guest on NEURO.tv could be the keynote speaker of an international scientific symposium where a hundred persons would gather to discuss upcoming directions of research. NEURO.tv accomplishes even more, by making the discussion public, freely available for anyone to listen to, and we do so at a fraction of the cost that a scientific symposium would represent. Importantly, we change the format of scientific presentation by making it an appealing, open discussion about issues in current neuroscience research, which leads to more honest exchanges about the limits of current research and leaves place for scientists to express their fascination about the questions that relate to how the brain works and how it generates our behaviors. We are grateful for your initial contribution to this project, which I believe is revolutionizing how academics exchange knowledge and determine the future directions of their research. I speak for the whole NEURO.tv team in thanking you for being part of a project that is bigger than each of us. Best regards, VelaSusan Park Vice President of NERUO.tv JD/LLM in Entrepreneurship '17 Duke Law School B.A. Political Science '13 Yale University EFTA00868913  please note The information contained in this communication is confidential, may be attorney-client privileged, may constitute inside information, and is intended only for the use of the addressee. It is the property of JEE Unauthorized use, disclosure or copying of this communication or any part thereof is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by return e-mail or by e-mail to and destroy this communication and all copies thereof, including all attachments. copyright -all rights reserved y by return e-mail or by e-mail to and destroy this communication and all copies thereof, including all attachments. copyright -all rights reserved r> EFTA00868914