Jeff Hawkins On Open Intelligence

 Artificial Intelligence  

Recently, Jeff Hawkins briefly outlined the breakthrough he and his team at Numenta have claimed in the field of machine intelligence. They have applied theory into practice, with the product, Grok.

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eff Hawkins' company, Numenta is working on machine intelligence. Their approach is to first understand, in detail, how the neocortex works and then build systems that work on those principles.

In the past few years they claim that they have made good progress on both the theory and implementing the theory in software. The resulting technology is a type of memory system based on sparse representations and distributed sequence memory. Like the brain, systems built on this technology need to be trained on streaming sensory data. The system learns the spatial and temporal structure in sensory data.

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Numenta has applied this technology to a commercial product called Grok. Grok is fed data from sensors, it discovers the structure in the data and uses this to make predictions and detect anomalies. Grok is being applied in diverse industries such as energy pricing, product forecasting, predictive maintenance, and finance.

According to Hawkins, Grok represents a new approach to machine learning and he believes it will be the fundamental component of all machine intelligence.

Hawkins is an engineer, serial entrepreneur, scientist, inventor, and author. He was a founder of two mobile computing companies, Palm and Handspring, and was the architect of many computing products such as the PalmPilot and Treo smartphone. Throughout his life Hawkins has also had a deep interest in neuroscience and theories of the neocortex. In 2002 he founded the Redwood Neuroscience Institute, a scientific institute focused on understanding how the neocortex processes information. The institute is now located at U.C. Berkeley.

In 2004 we wrote the book On Intelligence, which describes progress on understanding the neocortex. In 2005 he co-founded Numenta, a startup company building a technology based on neocortical theory. It is his hope that Numenta will play a catalytic role in the emerging field of machine intelligence.

SOURCE  OSCON 2013

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