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DARPA Testing Numenta's Brain Tech
lousyd writes "CNN Money reports that DARPA and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency have given $4.9 million to Lockheed Martin to develop an image recognition system that will be used to scan satellite images and photographs for familiar objects. Called Object Recognition via Brain-Inspired Technology (ORBIT), the system will fuse commercial airborne EO and LIDAR sensor data into a three-dimensional, photo-realistic model of the landscape. The brains of the system, so to speak, will be Numenta's Hierarchical Temporal Memory technology, modeled on the technology growing inside human heads. The system is expected to increase image analysts' productivity by 100 times."
Yep, I knew it. These guys want to know everything, I can just imagine what kind of black-deals they can cut with major corporations for competitive advantage, using the data being fed by these satellites to determine patterns in human behaviour and using that for strategic investment. And that is only the tip of the iceberg...
Tinfoil hat you say? One only has to look at history, Alexander thought himself a god (or wanted to be one) and man is obsessed with improving his power to dominate and control both peaceful and hostile populaces, the truth of the matter is, why let the future happen to you when you can start to predict it, and thereby shape it?
That is what the power mongers of this world want, is some modicum of ability to guide and shape history in their favor. And if you were at the top, among competitors that may beat you to it... you'd want it too.
Feature extraction, such as buildings and trees is already being done. In fact, the dot clouds produced by LIDAR provide enough information about trees that some research is focusing on ways to automate the identification of species of individual trees, and replicating that across an entire forest. But I digress... I, for one, welcome our Numenta powered, LIDAR scanning, ORBIT-Lords.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
I've studied both ART algorithms and HTMs and I cannot see how you can make a comparison, they are two completely different algorithms. A simple ART relies on *resonance* (hence it is called Adaptive *Resonance* Theory) between two only to classify the input. There is no resonance in HTMs, they are only feed forward classifiers. Furthermore, HTMs are hierarchical, the general ART algorithm is not hierarchical. In addition, HTMs train on sequences over time, the general ART algorithm trains on a set of static input patterns. Now, if you are refering to specific implementations of the ART algorithm, that is completely different, but you cannot compare HTMs with the general ART algorithm. Furthermore, HTMs or the latest flavor of multi-resolution ART algorithm, is not the issue. They both work *incredibly* well, and they are both fully capable of solving the general Artificial Intelligence problem. It is now just a matter of computer power.