iQ Company consults in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Artificial General Intelligence, Collective Intelligence, and financial applications.
Financial Applications
Currently, “meme stocks” are all the rage on WallStreet. But actually, “meme stocks” are just another manifestation of the phenomenon of retail investor sentiment moving the markets. For more than 14 years, Dr. Kaplan pioneered the field of harnessing opinions and sentiment from millions of retail investors to beat the market. These efforts culminated in 2018, with a hedge fund, powered exclusively by the collective intelligence of retail investors. The fund ranked in the top ten of all market-neutral hedge funds for the year. Shortly after this performance, Dr. Kaplan sold the company (PredictWallStreet) that generated these results.
Part of iQ Company’s long-term vision has always been to use funding generated by financial applications of Collective Intelligence to fund long-term research and educational efforts in the area of AI ethics and General Artificial Intelligence . Dr. Kaplan and his team remain available to design market-beating systems for select asset managers and other financial services companies. Our intent is that profits from our financial consulting will accelerate research in GAI and other areas to the benefit of all humans and our planet.
Collective Intelligence
“Two heads are better than one, so imagine what a million minds can do!”
That’s the fundamental idea behind the field of Collective Intelligence.
iQ pioneered the field, designing and deploying multiple crowdsourcing systems before the term “crowdsourcing” was invented. Domains ranged from developing high school exit exam questions to gathering and processing the stock market predictions of millions of retail investors in real-time to generate an edge in the market. iQ pioneered one of the world’s first online survey systems and Dr. Kaplan has authored dozens of patents related to the field.
Dr. Kaplan is interested in consulting projects related to the design of Collective Intelligence systems that involve harnessing the brainpower of hundreds, thousands, and millions of individual brains to solve large scale problems facing our planet and our people better and faster than otherwise possible.
Artificial Intelligence
Dr. Kaplan began his study of Artificial Intelligence (AI) more than 30 years ago under the mentorship of Dr. Herbert A. Simon and Allen Newell, two of the co-inventors of AI. He also studied with James McClelland, one of the pioneers -- along with Geoffrey Hinton, David Rumelhart, and others -- of neural networks and what is known as “deep learning” systems. For four years, Dr. Kaplan was a member of the Parallel Distributed Processing research group that Dr. McClelland led at Carnegie Mellon University.
Today, Dr. Kaplan is focused on solving the problem of General Artificial Intelligence (aka Artificial General Intelligence). He believes the fastest and best path to GAI involves combining the Collective Intelligence of humans with the expertise of specialized “idiot-savant” artificial intelligence systems. Dr. Kaplan has studied the problem of “Ethical AI” for more than two decades. His general views are reflected in the iQ Studios WorldThink series of videos, with a particular focus on the episodes on The Rise of AI and General Artificial Intelligence.
