Numenta.org has been created as the home for the NuPIC (Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing) open source project and community. The project was announced today in a keynote address at the OSCON open source conference.
“The mission of this project is to build a community interested in machine intelligence based on biological principles,” said Jeff Hawkins, co-founder of Numenta, Inc. “Developers and scientists told us they wanted to work with our learning algorithms. There were already several independent implementations based on our publications. We felt that an open source structure was the best way to share knowledge and accelerate progress in machine intelligence.”
Hawkins, who has studied neuroscience for more than 30 years, wrote a book called On Intelligence (along with Sandra Blakeslee) in 2005 that described a theory of the neocortex. Numenta, Inc. was formed as a company to pursue the theory for commercial and scientific purposes shortly thereafter.
NuPIC comprises a set of learning algorithms called the Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) first described in a whitepaper published by Numenta in 2009. The CLA algorithms replicate part of the function of a region of the neocortex. They can be used for pattern recognition, prediction, and anomaly detection in many domains. They have been tested extensively and are embedded in a product called Grok, which the company released last year. Grok is now being branded and commercialized separately from Numenta.
“Understanding the brain and building fantastically intelligent machines is a grand quest for humanity,” Hawkins continued. “This is not a trivial pursuit, and there is a tremendous amount of work to be done, but we believe the CLA is a key building block that provides a path forward. Our hope is that NuPIC
contributors will work on these problems, accelerate our progress, and uncover fascinating new applications.”
Anyone can access the NuPIC open source code under the AGPLv3 license*. For more information see the Introduction to NuPIC and go to http://numenta.org.
* This content has been updated to reflect our new AGPL license.
About Numenta.org
Numenta.org is the home and community for the NuPIC (Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing) open source project. NuPIC was developed by Numenta Inc. based on the theory of the neocortex first described in co-founder Jeff Hawkins’ 2005 book On Intelligence.
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