Jeff Hawkins

Hawkins grew up in an inventive family on the north shore of Long Island, who developed a floating air cushion platform that was used for waterfront concerts.[5]

He attended Cornell University, where he received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1979,[5] then started work for Intel.

Hawkins moved to GRiD Systems in 1982, where he developed rapid application development (RAD) software called GRiDtask.[6]

Hawkins' interest in pattern recognition for speech and text input to computers led him to enroll in the biophysics program at the University of California, Berkeley in 1986. While there he patented a "pattern classifier" for handwritten text, but his PhD proposal was rejected, apparently because none of the professors there were working in that field. The setback led him back to GRiD, where, as vice president of research, he developed their pen-based computing initiative that in 1989 spawned the GRiDPad, one of the first tablet computers.[7]

Hawkins desired to move on with the development of a smaller, hand-held device, but executives at GRiD were reluctant to take the risk. Tandy Corporation had acquired GRiD in 1988, and they were willing to support Hawkins in a new venture company.

Hawkins founded Palm Inc. in January 1992. Their first product was the Zoomer, a collaboration with Palm applications, GeoWorks OS, Casio hardware, and Tandy marketing. The Apple Newton came out about the same time, late 1993, but both products failed, partly due to poor character recognition software. Hawkins responded with Graffiti, a simpler and more effective recognition product that ran on both the Zoomer and the Newton. They also developed HotSync synchronization software for Hewlett-Packard devices.[8]

Hawkins searched for partners to build a simple new handheld, but was stymied until modem manufacturer USRobotics stepped in with the financial backing and manufacturing expertise to bring the PalmPilot to market in early 1996. By the fall of 1998, US Robotics' new owner, 3Com, was hindering his plans.

Hawkins left the company along with Palm co-founders Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan to start Handspring, which debuted the Handspring Visor in September 1999. 3Com ended up spinning off Palm in March 2000, which then merged in a reconfluence with Handspring in August 2003.[8][9]

In March 2005, Hawkins, together with Dubinsky (Palm's original CEO) and Dileep George, founded Numenta, Inc.[10]

The company is based in Redwood City, California. They had a dual mission: to reverse-engineer the neocortex and enable machine intelligence technology based on brain theory. They have been using biological information about the structure of the neocortex to guide the development of their theory on how the brain works. They have come up with a machine intelligence technology called Hierarchical temporal memory (HTM). HTM can find patterns in noisy streaming data, model the latent causes, and make predictions about what patterns will come next.

The company says that its biologically inspired machine learning technology is based on a theory of the neocortex first described in co-founder Hawkins' book, On Intelligence. Numenta is a technology provider and does not create go-to-market solutions for specific use cases. They license their technology and intellectual property for commercial purposes. In addition, Numenta has created NuPIC (Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing) as an open source project.[11]

On 28 July 2020, the company announced Hawkins’ new book, A Thousand Brains. It will be released on March 2, 2021. The book details the advances he and the Numenta team made that led to the ground-breaking discovery of how the brain understands the world and what it means to be intelligent. The book also details how The Thousand Brains Theory will impact the future of machine intelligence and what an understanding of the brain says about the threats and opportunities facing humanity.[3]

After graduating from Cornell in June 1979, he read a special issue of Scientific American on the brain in which Francis Crick lamented the lack of a grand theory explaining how the brain functions. Initially, Hawkins attempted to join the MIT AI Lab but was refused.[12][13]

In 2002, after two decades of finding little interest from neuroscience institutions, Hawkins founded the Redwood Neuroscience Institute in Menlo Park, California. As a result of the formation of Hawkins' new company, Numenta, the Institute was moved to the University of California, Berkeley on July 1, 2005, renamed the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, and is now administered through the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute.[14]

In 2004, Hawkins published On Intelligence (with The New York Times science writer Sandra Blakeslee), laying out his "memory-prediction framework" of how the brain works.[10][15] The memory-prediction framework encompasses a number of methods that the brain uses to classify input and recognize patterns. Hawkins' theory suggests an "unsupervised learning system" where accurate modelling is the only goal.[16]

One area of interest to Hawkins is cortical columns. These are structures in the neocortex where it is believed the brain creates and stores models of objects in the environment that it encounters. Hawkins theorizes that movement (ie, not just sensory input, but also information regarding the object's location and how we experience it over time) is a key component to the functions of cortical columns. He believes this component will be important to consider in future AI development.[17]

In 2016, Hawkins hypothesized that cortical columns did not just capture a sensation, but also the relative location of that sensation, in three dimensions rather than two (situated capture), in relation to what was around it. Hawkins explains, "When the brain builds a model of the world, everything has a location relative to everything else".[18]

In 2018, Hawkins proposed The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence, a new framework for intelligence and cortical computation.[19]

In 2019 at CSICon conference—Hawkins spoke about basic and applied research and explained "We are beginning to find that there are diverse columns in the neocortex, with most columns getting their input from other columns, not direct sensory input".[20]

• Hawkins, Jeff with Sandra Blakeslee (2004). On Intelligence, Times Books, Henry Holt and Co. ISBN 0-8050-7456-2.
• Hawkins, Jeff (2021). A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence, Basic Books. ISBN 1-5416-7581-9.

• Numenta
• Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience