Meet the team behind the Mindplex Magazine
After months of writing and editing content, coding and designing a fresh website, and creating an organizational structure, Mindplex is ready to launch its Magazine/Social Media platform. Mindplex Magazine is Mindplex’s media spin-off, bringing you news from the front lines of the technological Singularity.
Hruy Tsegaye – CEO and Co-Founder
Hruy Tsegaye, CEO and co-founder of Mindplex, co-founded SingularityNET’s iCog Labs in 2012. This was the first privately funded AI research and development company in East Africa. In addition to his software and product development management role, he has published several articles focusing on AI and emerging technologies.
Hruy co-authored The End of the Beginning: Life, Society, and Economy on the Brink of the Singularity. He is among the few Africans to become a committee member in IEEE's Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems and the CXI Council. He also contributed content to the IEEE Ethically Aligned Design Work paper (Volume 1 and Volume 2) in 2016 and 2017.
In 2014, Hruy launched the largest African University student network, the iMakers Initiative. The initiative has over 36 public universities in Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Kenya. iMakers address technological inequality, focusing on AI and Robotics.
“Technology, as one of the main tools shaping society, was supposed to make us a smarter, more rational, more well-informed collective of independent individuals,” notes Hruy. “If you do not accept that, I do not accept your technology. Unfortunately, the current trend in the media business abandoned this objective and went the other way: the attention economy! Content today is created, distributed, and stored if and only if it feeds the never-ending need for attention. Quality, merit, rationality, fairness, and substance are no longer the signals and indicators of good content. To be blunt, what we have today is propaganda! Time and again, the world has witnessed the effect of propaganda: individuals will not grow as independent and rational members of society”.
“Ask yourself to what end are you directing your attention? I say help us shape Mindplex; join and contribute so we can silence the propaganda machines. Mindplex has the potential to be the long-awaited disrupter. It has the tools to decentralize media end-to-end content creation, distribution, and storage while maintaining quality via a merit-based reputation and tokenomics system.”
Amara Angelica – Senior Editor/Co-Founder
Amara Angelica was the Editor of KurzweilAI.net for 18 years and helped Ray Kurzweil create The Singularity Is Near and other books.
“I’m really excited to be working now with the brilliant global team at SingularityNET and Mindplex,” says Amara, an electrical engineer, inventor, and electronic musician. “Mindplex is all about exploring, creating, and developing amazing, radical new ideas – maybe new realities – collaborating with our awesome reader/writer partners and AI-enabled services.”
An IEEE member, Amara’s current obsessions include exploring brain-sensors-AI-global-brain communications, extending her popular (over 206,000 views) 2019 co-authored paper in Frontiers in Neuroscience, and creating AI-based music/images inspired by the sonified cosmos.
Ben Goertzel — Editor-in-Chief
Dr. Ben Goertzel is the CEO of SingularityNET Foundation, the OpenCog Foundation, and the AGI Society. He has been working on OpenCog, the open-source Artificial General Intelligence engine, for more than 15 years, and has published 25+ scientific books, and ~150 technical papers on AI and related subjects.
Conor O'Higgins – COO
Conor has worked in the media side of the blockchain industry since 2016 and was named one of the top 30 crypto journalists in the world. He provided marketing and media support for cryptocurrency launches, including some of the top 100 coins like Holo, Hedera Hashgraph, and SingularityNET’s AGIX.
“The media environment today is in a bad way: quality is buried under trash, truth, kindness, and connection are lost under snark and attack,” says Conor. “It's affecting a generation's mental health, and everyone recognizes the problem. The problems come from the algorithms, and we have better algorithms: algorithms that sort for truth and trust instead of impulsiveness.”
Lisa Rein – Producer/Editor/Co-host of the Mindplex Podcast
Lisa Rein is an Editor-at-large at Mindplex and the Producer and Editor of the Mindplex Podcast, which she co-hosts with Ben Goertzel and the robots Grace and Desdemona. She has been a freelance journalist for over 25 years, writing for Wired, Boing Boing, CNET, Mondo 2000, and many others. She has also been Dr. Timothy Leary's Digital Librarian since 1995 and was the text editor and graphics editor for Dr. Leary’s last published work, the graphic novel Surfing the Conscious Nets (Last Gasp, 1995). (Here’s the phone message from Dr. Leary where he thanks Lisa.)
Lisa is a co-founder of Creative Commons and has been Chelsea Manning's archivist since 2015, when she led the effort to convince President Obama to commute Chelsea's prison sentence. Lisa was an Assistant Producer for the Emmy Award-winning documentary XY Chelsea and is also a subject in the film. She is a singer/musician/producer, performing as Lunar Elf, and is honored to have performed with Desdemona the Robot's Jam Galaxy band in New York City in June 2022.
Leykun Ejigu, developer
Leykun Ejigu, a developer, is a Blockchain and AI enthusiast. In the last eight years, he has worked on multiple commercial projects involving Computer vision, NLP, and smart contracts. Leykun is passionate and curious about how AI and Blockchain combined could bring a new world order.
“Today's media governance and financial institutions are controlled by governments and corporations. Our thoughts and wealth are greatly monitored and censored. Decentralized media could disrupt this and liberate first our way of thinking, and then return the control back to the common folks.”
Debashis Saha, UX designer
Debashis Saha is a UX professional with 11 years of hands-on experience in UX design, interaction design, journey maps, rapid prototyping, structuring, and visualizing dashboards spanning across healthcare, FinTech, editorial magazines, and social media. His abilities span multiple platforms: native mobile, responsive & web in both iOS and Android platforms.
Debashis says, “Media is one of the channels of general communication and information source in society. Today, more than any other time, it needs to be given more human touch amid this data-driven era”.
Esubalew Amenu, lead backend developer
Esubalew Amenu, the lead backend developer, is a detail-oriented tech engineer. He has a keen ability to adopt to new software design and development concepts. He has been an inspirational project leader for the last six years. He is obsessed with timely delivery. After completing his second degree, he had been a company man, a freelancer, an entrepreneur, and now a Mindplexer.
“I hope decentralized media will be accepted as an effective and trusted information delivery model. Humanity yearns for independence. Unfair value systems and standards along with outdated political norms can evolve if media platforms can decrease any and all kind of editorial interference that has ulterior motives. Let's bring back merit and credibility”, says Esubalew.
Dawit Mekonnen, web developer
Dawit Mekonnen is an ambitious web developer. He loves to play with front end concepts and overturn clichés in front-end development. Dawit says, “I have three wishes for any online social/media platform: safeguarding user privacy, safeguarding user privacy, and safeguarding user privacy. This is not optional, right?”
Anna Ostrovska, UI designer
Anna Ostrovska, lover of colors, leads the Mindplex UI design. She is a multi-talented graphic designer with experience in digital illustration, 3-D modeling, and sculpting. She is able to give life and warmth to visual designs of software products, virtual characters, and 2-D sketchings.
With her degree in Computer Science, she is fluent in technical processes, and her creative mind enlivens the tech side of Mindplex.
“For better or worse, media is a huge and powerful thing in our hands, which helps us to find our own place in society and the world. The artist’s responsibility is to protect the media and freedom of expression”, says Anna.
Tesfaye Assefa (Tesfu), illustrator
Tesfaye Assefa (Tesfu), the Mindplex illustrator, is an established painter, sculptor, and mosaic artist in Ethiopia. Tesfu had always loved art since childhood. In the last two decades, countless curators and art exhibitors have displayed his works in Ethiopia, France, and Mali. In the past ten years, he has transitioned to the digital world and is now a skilled computer graphic designer and 3-D modeling artist.
Since his graduation from Addis Ababa University School of Fine Arts & Design in the late 2000s, he has been busy freelancing for governments, city administrations, and international companies.
In addition to his paintings, his instrumental works include the designing and mounting of mosaics and monumental sculptures. His statues and mosaics add culture to Ethiopian cities such as Sodo (the Wolayta Cultural Center in Wolayta Sodo), Hawassa (the Sidama Cultural Center Hall), and Addis Ababa (the Saint Mary’s Church).
“Art is the highest level of language to understand the universe”, says Tesfu.
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