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Palm Founders Form AI Company

Posted by Zonk on from the pocket-intelligence dept.

Mentifex writes "As reported in the New York Times, Kansas City Star and other news media, Jeff Hawkins (co-author of On Intelligence) and Donna Dubinsky, co-founders of Palm Computing and Handspring, along with Dileep George as the principal engineer, are starting an AI company named Numenta as a follow-up to Hawkins' recent work on visual processing."

4 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. Numenta = AI Company? by bigtallmofo · · Score: 4, Informative

    It appears the article summary might be misleading. From the first sentence of www.numenta.com:

    Numenta is developing a new type of computer memory system modeled after the human neocortex. The applications of this technology are broad and can be applied to solve problems in computer vision, artificial intelligence, robotics and machine learning.

    They further go on to say:

    Numenta is a technology platform provider rather than an application developer. The Company is creating a scalable software toolkit that will allow developers and partners to configure and adapt HTM systems to particular problems.

    My reading on this is that they aren't an AI company - they're just developing a technology that could be used for AI or many, many other uses.

    --
    I'm a big tall mofo.
  2. Foldiak? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    I'm surprised that the short summary, from my brief perusal, does not include reference to work by Peter Foldiak (1991, 199?) and Wallis (1996). Both these authors published numerous papers on temporal and spatial coherence. My MSc in 1996 was also on the same topic followed by human research on the same problem. All of the computational work was with unsupervised learning algorithms varying whether the temporal processing was at the input our output stage.

    I guess I'll have to read the original paper. However, the notion of temporal processing has been around for a long time.

    Note: My own human research has yielded reliable data that addresses the acquisition of invariant object recognition.

  3. Re:A.L.I.C.E Makes for Interesting Conversation by Quixote · · Score: 3, Informative
    Nice try, kid. No, neither A.L.I.C.E. nor anyone else has truly passed the Turing Test (read up about it before commenting further; in particular, read what it means to pass the test). The Loebner prize is designed to be _like_ the Turing Test; but the winner of the Loebner Prize is not the 'bot who passes the Turing Test, but the 'bot who scores the most points. So, if 1 'bot scores 1 point and all the others score 0, then the 'bot with the single point wins.

    If a 'bot passes the Turing Test, it will be big news, trust me.

  4. AI Reinasence by projectNOR · · Score: 3, Informative

    There are actually quite a few projects now taking similar, cortex-centric approaches to AI hard problems. Are we up to something here? The guys responsible of these projects are not wacko types at all, but established entrepreneurs and/or well-known researchers:

    CCortex "A 20-billion neuron simulation of the Human Cortex and peripheral systems."
    Cyc a knowledge base with vast collection of facts about the real world and logical reasoning ability. Financed by Paul Allen AI related investment company,Vulcan.
    Numenta is developing a new type of computer memory system modeled after the human neocortex.

    They seem to we well financed, and knowledgeable. Are we witnessing the start of something big here?