Tidbits on Numenta

Wow has it been a slow summer for HTM news. I have never seen a period of time where Numenta's employees have made so few public appearances. Since Hawkins' talk in March, I haven't seen any mention of any Numenta speeches, interviews, or papers of any kind. A few things of note:

-In its June newsletter, Numenta mentioned that it decided not to attempt an HTM workshop this year, meaning that the next generation algorithms will not be out this year. In their words, they decided not to push for an "interim" release this year, but to delay the workshop and release to 2011. "Interim" was an interesting choice of words, suggesting that a more fully featured product will be the result when NUPIC 2.0 does come out.

-Dileep George has a new blog on his website. It is called Mind Matter, and is located at the following link.

-I saw an interesting blog post regarding a robot called Nao that can apparently show and understand emotion. The author claims that the creators of the new robot software were using HTM software in the robot. I have not been able to verify that claim. The only mention of HTM in the context of a Nao robot that I found was an article by Ben Goertzel in which he describes using an HTM for low level perception in a Nao robot. That article specifically states that he hasn't implemented the idea yet, however. Find the link here.

-Finally, Tomaso Poggio, a Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and one of the creators of a biology-based hierarchical learning model known at HMAX, has created a software model that uses GPUs to greatly accelerate software that is designed to emulate the cortex, such as HTM or HMAX. Poggio claims that the software accelerates these biology-based models by an amazing 80-100 times. Poggio is listed as a technical advisor on Numenta's website, so hopefully they are aware of this, especially given the increased computational demands of NUPIC 2.0.