A few months ago, our Open Source Community Manager Matt Taylor shared that he had begun live-streaming our research meetings. It started as an experiment, really. Was it possible to stay true to our commitment to transparency without disrupting the research meetings? So far, the answer is yes, at least from our side. Now that we’re a few months in, I thought I’d provide some of the highlights.
The pop-up stream
While our research meetings have a set time and agenda going in, sometimes we have an unplanned topic, as was the case over lunch about a week ago. We have several new research interns in the office, so Jeff decided to do a session for them on how he models neurons. This work is described in a 2016 paper, “Why Neurons Have Thousands of Synapses, A Theory of Sequence Memory in Neocortex.” The impromptu whiteboarding session quickly became one of our most popular streams, both live and after the fact.
The guest stream
We often have visiting scientists, and earlier this month, Professor Priya Panda came to Numenta for two days, and presented her paper, which is scheduled to be published in Nature, “Towards Spike-based Machine Intelligence with Neuromorphic Computing.” It’s great to have visitors that are open to livestreaming their work as well.
The paper review stream
The research meetings are the cornerstone of everything we do, and many of them involve paper reviews, both of neuroscience and machine learning topics. One recent meeting covered the Neuralink announcement and the paper that accompanied it. Our VP of Research Subutai Ahmad reviewed Elon Musk and team’s paper, and led a discussion on the topic.
With our focus on applying our neocortical theories to machine learning, we have been reviewing an increasing number of machine learning papers. You can browse through them in our Research Meetings playlist.
One-stop YouTube shop
One thing that has changed since Matt started streaming is that he no longer streams on Twitch and has moved everything to YouTube. While Twitch was an excellent place to create content, having everything in one place is much more convenient. Now you can go to our YouTube channel to see when the next livestream is, access playlists of past streams, and more.
It’s been exciting to watch this livestream experiment play out and engage with more people as we continue on our mission. If you haven’t yet, check out the upcoming livestream calendar, pull up a screen, and we’ll see you in the research room.
Christy Maver • VP of Marketing