Jürgen Schmidhuber wants to build an optimal scientist, then retire. He is Director of the Swiss Artificial Intelligence Lab IDSIA (since 1995), Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Lugano, Switzerland (since 2009), Head of the CogBotLab at TU Munich,Germany (since 2004, as Professor Extraordinarius until 2009), and Professor SUPSI, Switzerland (since 2003). He obtained his doctoral degree in computer science from TUM in 1991 and his Habilitation degree in 1993, after a postdoctoral stay at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He helped to transform IDSIA into one of the world's top ten AI labs (the smallest!), according to the ranking of Business Week Magazine. He is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, and has published more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers (some won best paper awards) on topics such as machine learning, mathematically optimal universal AI, artificial curiosity and creativity, artificial recurrent neural networks (which won several recent handwriting recognition contests), adaptive robotics, algorithmic information and complexity theory, digital physics, theory of beauty, and the fine arts.