ZURICH,

Nov. 17, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- The Mindfire Foundation is uniting some of the best talents in the world to work together on one of the greatest unsolved challenges of our time – to understand how the mind works, in order to apply that knowledge to build human level artificial intelligence. Unlike other initiatives, Mindfire is an independent movement uniting individuals, research institutions, and companies alike.

Mindfire's Missions are not only unconventional but also ambitious: unite 100 brilliant minds, bring them together in the Swiss mountains for 2 weeks, and let them work on some of the toughest AI challenges. These missions will continue to bring in new talents at great diversity from essentially all fields of science, systematically increasing the competence of the networked intelligence.

Rather than reducing intelligence to algorithms, Mindfire aims at decoding the human brain as a whole. "We cannot achieve real progress in AI as long as we don't understand the principles that underlie intelligence," said Pascal Kaufmann, Founder of the Mindfire Foundation and co-Founder of Starmind. "Intelligence has evolved as a means of nature to successfully guide us through an ever-changing environment. This gave rise to behavior, emotions, and consciousness. These critical factors must be taken into account in how we develop AI. This is the purpose of the Mindfire Foundation."

Mindfire is led by a number of well-known scientists: Christoph von der Malsburg, advisor to the Human Brain Project and one of the pioneers in the field of Neural Networks, Rolf Pfeifer, visiting professor and honorary professor at the department of Automation, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China is member of the AI board, Luciano Floridi, advisor to numerous tech companies and governments, and Joanna Bryson, AI researcher at the University of Bath and affiliate at Princeton University who leads the ethics board.

Mindfire is currently selecting talents for its missions. Applicants must provide details on their academic and professional history as well as why they qualify for inclusion. As a participant, all travel expenses, accommodations, meals, beverages, and entertainment expenses will be covered and admission to Mindfire is recognized with a special medal. Additionally, there will be a blockchain based tokenization process in place to award each participant for tackling the mind code and sharing their IP. Anyone joining the movement can register via: www.mindfire.global.