Jeff Hawkins' Cortex Sim Platform Available

UnreasonableMan writes "Jeff Hawkins is best known for founding Palm Computing and Handspring, but for the last eighteen months he's been working on his third company, Numenta. In his 2005 book, On Intelligence, Hawkins laid out a theoretical framework describing how the neocortex processes sensory inputs and provides outputs back to the body. Numenta's goal is to build a software model of the human brain capable of face recognition, object identification, driving, and other tasks currently best undertaken by humans. For an overview see Hawkins' 2005 presentation at UC Berkeley. It includes a demonstration of an early version of the software that can recognize handwritten letters and distinguish between stick figure dogs and cats. White papers are available at Numenta's website. Numenta wisely decided to build a community of developers rather than trying to make everything proprietary. Yesterday they released the first version of their free development platform and the source code for their algorithms to anyone who wants to download it."

High-Quality Video Link

[overeduc8ed]

High quality versions of Jeff Hawkin's talk at UC Berkeley are available here [archive.org].

Re:Right...

[not-admin]

That book was published over a year ago, lots can and has changed in that time.

Plus, he's sure because he's proposing a solution to the 'unsolved problem.'

Re:Barrier to entry

[Wagoo]

Hawkins' published a book before this was implemented in code called "On Intelligence". You could do worse than starting by reading through that.

He's also done some lectures available on Google Video [google.com].

Confidentiality agreement a killer

[else58]

The download license looked fine until the Confidentiality paragraph. Does it really say that anything I learn from Numenta is confidential property of Numenta?

Confidentiality. 1. Protection of Confidential Information. You agree that all code, inventions, algorithms, business concepts, workflow, ideas, and all other business, technical and financial information, including but not limited to the HTM Algorithms, HTM Algorithms Source Code, and HTM Technology, that you obtain or learn from Numenta in connection with this Agreement are the confidential property of Numenta (Confidential Information). Except as authorized herein, you will hold in confidence and not use, except as permitted or required in the Agreement, or disclose any Confidential Information and you will similarly bind your employees in writing. You will not be obligated under this Section 6 with respect to information that you can document: (i) is or has become readily publicly available without restriction through no fault of you or your employees or agents; or (ii) is received without restriction from a third party lawfully in possession of such information and lawfully empowered to disclose such information; or (iii) was rightfully in your possession without restriction prior to its disclosure by Numenta; or (iv) was independently developed by your employees or consultants without access to such Confidential Information.

Re: Not one year, seven or eight years

[stephanruby]

That book was published over a year ago, lots can and has changed in that time.

Actually, its content was produced seven or eight years ago.

Its publishing date was "December 2005". But publishers will lie about the publication date of a book if it allows them to sell more books. And in this case, I wouldn't be surprised if the book came out hot off the presses in December 2004 with a postdate of "December 2005"

Furthermore, this book was based on the scientific proceedings of a conference which occurred six years before the book was finally edited (or finally published). I'm actually not sure of the year of the scientific conference itself, because the information supplied to sell the book doesn't give the actual year.

Re:Right...

[fyngyrz]

Any comments from people with expertise in this area?

Yes; his reasoning is laid out in the beginning of this document. [numenta.com] The thinking seems quite reasonable to me, as far as it goes. AI is my area of research.