I’m happy to share two exciting announcements with you this month. First, we recently completed our initial paper on sensorimotor integration, “Why Does the Neocortex Have Layers and Columns, A Theory of Learning the 3D Structure of the World.” This paper articulates a major insight that Jeff had last spring when he uncovered a missing ingredient about how the brain works. Specifically, the insight led to a new understanding of how the brain learns through movement, which we think will have profound implications on neuroscience and machine intelligence. Our research team has spent much of the past year testing and documenting this discovery, with the goal of publishing the theory in a scientific journal. We have submitted the paper for peer review, but in the meantime, I invite you to read the preprint version on bioRxiv, and view the accompanying video. This is the first of several manuscripts we have planned on the topic, and you can expect to see our researchers talking about it at various events and conferences.
Our second piece of news is that we have released NuPIC 1.0. For those who are not familiar with it, NuPIC, which stands for Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing, is our open source project that we started in 2013. With the help of the HTM open source community, we have done extensive research on how the brain processes sequences – what’s known as sequence memory. We created several example applications to demonstrate how it can be used for anomaly detection and prediction, and we documented our work in papers, posters and talks. NuPIC 1.0 represents a milestone we set to have a stable, well-documented release of HTM sequence memory and its streaming data applications.
So now that we’ve released 1.0, what comes next? We are thrilled to be doubling down on research. By focusing on the sensorimotor integration work, we believe we can rapidly accelerate the progress of HTM theory. We will continue to make our work transparent and provide access to experimental code and educational materials. You can read more about our research plans from Jeff in this recent blog post.
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Christy Maver • Director of Marketing