Israeli-American computer scientist, AI entrepreneur, and former Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Tennessee (2003-2021), where he headed the Machine Intelligence Lab for over a decade. In 2009, Arel was introduced to Jeffrey Epstein by Ben Goertzel and traveled to meet Epstein in Palm Beach, Florida - a trip funded by Epstein. Approximately one month later, Arel emailed Epstein: ‘I'm ready to change the world, given a chance to do so.’ Between 2009 and 2016, Arel corresponded with Epstein about facial recognition technology and humanoid robots, with LinkedIn interactions continuing through 2017.
In March 2010, Arel and Goertzel prepared a draft R&D proposal for the Epstein Foundation to develop a ‘robotic AGI toddler’ - an AI system with the intelligence of a 3-4 year old child - with a $3 million price tag. Arel's contribution was the DeSTIN (Deep SpatioTemporal Inference Network) facial recognition system he had developed with UT graduate students. In 2011, Arel requested $50,000 from Epstein for a sabbatical at George Mason University.
Critically, Arel used University of Tennessee student time and resources on Epstein-funded work, raising institutional ethics questions. After leaving UT in 2021, Arel founded Apprente (AI voice agents for drive-throughs), which was acquired by McDonald's in 2019, where he became VP and head of McD Tech Labs. He later co-founded Tenyx (acquired by Salesforce in 2024) and is currently a venture partner at Marado Ventures.
The facial recognition technology from the Epstein-funded DeSTIN project was later incorporated into Hanson Robotics' Sophia robot. Documents from DOJ Data Set 9 contain extensive email correspondence between Arel and Epstein.