Re: [Nesim-java] Jeff Hawkins: Brain science is about to fundamentally change computing

[Chris E. <cel...@uw...>]

Hi Shu,

I'm quite familiar with Jeff's work, am good friends with
the director of RNI, and have seen talks/read papers on it.
Not to burst any bubbles, but from everything I've seen it
looks more like a marketing exercise than interesting science.
Hawkins' work hasn't contributed to state of the art theoretical
neuroscience at all (in fact, he's rehashed old ideas and tried
to sell them through his company).  What he has tried to sell
as a 'new theory' is the (old) observeration that there is
significant repetitive structure (cortical microcircuits) to
cortex (which is less than half the neurons in the brain) and
that thus there should be some general computational
principles explaining cortical function.  The 'theory' is a
poor implementation of Bayesian inference in a network which
has never demonstrated good pattern recognition on any
standard benchmarks -- they have a few results on non-standard
recognition problems, which aren't challenging as far as I
can tell.

I hope you don't take this as a reason not to send me links you
think are cool -- please do!  Just thought you might want another
opinion on what you found :)

best, .c

Shu Wu wrote:
> Found this talk (from TED 2003) very interesting: 
> http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/125
> 
> "To date, there hasn't been an overarching theory of how the human brain 
> really works, Jeff Hawkins argues in this compelling talk. That's 
> because we still haven't defined intelligence accurately. But one 
> thing's for sure, he says: The brain isn't like a powerful computer 
> processor. It's more like a memory system that records everything we 
> experience and helps us predict, intelligently, what will happen next. 
> Bringing this new brain science to computer devices will enable powerful 
> new applications -- and it will happen sooner than you think."
> 
> 
> A link to the Redwood neuroscience institute: 
> http://www.rni.org/mission.html
> 
> 
> -- 
> Shu Wu
> http://www.sgsolutions.ca
> 
> 
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