Jeff Hawkins is the chief innovator in the brain-meets-machine world of computers. With the breakthroughs of the Palm-Pilot, first introduced in 1996, and the Treo, unveiled in 2001, Hawkins has been polishing up his theory of how the brain works.
Now approaching 50 years of age, Hawkins is about creating the first truly intelligent computer through his start-up company, Numenta, founded in 2005.
The computers running Numenta software will not be programmed like regular computers. The algorithms that Numenta has come up with allow machines to learn from observation. The neocortex-like computer memory system remembers the patterns of the world presented to it and uses them, the way a human does, to make analogies and draw conclusions. If it works as Hawkins expects, the applications and business opportunities will be stunning.
To understand how Numenta's software works, it helps to first understand Hawkins' concept of the brain. Hawkins is interested in only the neocortex, the outer, pink part of the brain where he believes intelligence resides. "Intelligence is about creating a model of the world and making predictions," he says. Hawkins views the neocortex as a memory system that constantly adapts and reorganizes its connections to create that model. "When you come across new things every moment of your waking life," he says, "it looks at previously stored experience and predicts what will happen next."
The different regions of the neocortex all do pretty much the same thing, Hawkins believes. They store spatial and temporal patterns that can represent things like language, music, and vision. In his view, all the human senses work the same way: Data from the world goes in as patterns of firing neurons, memories of the patterns are formed, and every piece of new information is matched to a stored sequence of patterns. In other words, there is one general brain algorithm that recognizes and interprets all those blips on the brain.
To many neuroscientists, this is a gross oversimplification but Hawkins thinks that "....what's missing is a concrete theory about how it (neuro-science) all hangs together." Numenta is developing what Hawkins calls a "hierarchical temporal memory (HTM)" system. The system mimics the structure of the neocortex. "The HTM has to really learn from its data---the way we learn growing up as children," explains Subutai Ahmad, Numenta's vice president for engineering. The key difference between an HTM and a regular computer is that you don't program an HTM, it learns by itself through observation. This could fundamentally change the relationship between the programmer and the computer.
For Hawkins, the ultimate applications will be those that allow us to acquire new knowledge in areas of science such as quantum mechanics and biology. "What is exciting to me," he says, "is the prospect of building intelligent machines that sit comfortably in the realms of science where we have difficulty thinking. It will be like having a dedicated Einstein working around the clock on these problems."
Source: Business 2.0, January/February 2007