As 2018 is well underway, I’m pleased to share several events we have scheduled for the coming weeks. You may recall that last month our Co-founder Jeff Hawkins spent a week on the east coast presenting our latest research at Cold Spring Harbor Labs, Boston University, and MIT. On February 5, Jeff will be back east, delivering his talk, “Have We Missed Most of What the Neocortex Does? Allocentric Location as the Basis of Perception” at the Janelia Research Campus.
On February 8-9, VP of Research Subutai Ahmad will be at the Dendritic Integration and Computation with Active Dendrites Workshop in Paris, France. Subutai will present a workshop titled, “The Predictive Neuron: How Active Dendrites Enable Spatiotemporal Computation in the Neocortex.”
Jeff, Subutai and several members of our research team will be at Computational and Systems Neuroscience Meeting (COSYNE) 2018 March 1-6 in Denver, CO. Subutai will speak at a workshop titled, “Cortical circuits: functions and models of long-range connections.” In addition, the research team will present two posters:
A neural mechanism for determining allocentric locations of sensed features by Marcus Lewis and Jeff Hawkins
Reflecting some of our newest work, this poster shows how cortical columns can use multiple independent moving sensors to identify and locate objects. It lays out a model inspired by grid cell modules that describes how the brain computes and represents locations.
Robust dendritic computations with sparse distributed representations by Subutai Ahmad, Max Schwarzer and Jeff Hawkins
This poster covers one of the fundamental properties of cortical theory: sparse distributed representations. It lays out a mathematical framework for analyzing SDR properties, and their relationships to dendritic computations and HTM theory.
In other news, Jeff was recently a featured guest on a new podcast series by Loup Ventures called Braintech. In this 25 minute interview, host Doug Clinton asks Jeff about how Numenta’s biological approach differs from other deep learning techniques, why Jeff believes current fears about AI are irrational, and what he has learned since writing On Intelligence more than ten years ago.
We also have a new blog post titled “Navigating Numenta’s Brain Theory through a Progression of Papers,” that looks at our published research to date and explains how each paper contributes to our overall theory. Our goal is to document all of our work, and there are more papers underway, but for those of you who want to catch up on what’s available, I invite you to read this post.
Lastly, for those of you who like to keep up with the news coming out of the AI and neuroscience fields, we have put together a Numenta News Digest. This weekly collection of 10-12 articles and analysis started as an internal communication designed to help Numenta team members sift through the ever-increasing amount of machine intelligence and brain-related headlines. In the hopes that others may find this useful as well, we decided to make it available to anyone interested. If you’d like to receive our weekly digest and see the stories we think are worth reading, you can subscribe here.
Thank you for continuing to follow Numenta. We’re looking forward to a successful 2018 as we move closer to completing the theory and filling out the framework for how the neocortex works.
Christy Maver • VP of Marketing