Introduce yourself!

Kent Langley. I read On Intelligence when it came out and it had a profound impact on my thinking about machine learning and AI. I’ve been learning, staying aware and researching on the topic ever since and looking for ways to apply the technology.

I run my own technology advisory and research firm ProductionScale, Inc. It’s been in operation since 2012. I have built and managed several companies in the last 21 years and helped lots of people do that say. Usually from a technology perspective.

As faculty, I teach in the Data Science and Exponential Organizations (driving organizational scalability with the judicious use of advanced technologies and processes) tracks at Singularity University. I have presented on Numenta, Nupic and derivatives of it many times in my lectures at SU.

Recently, I’ve had a new child (our 3rd), been working with a South American company to use data science to increase protein production for human nutritional quality improvement, worked with a Chinese marketing company to use Data Science / Software to help with Ad placements and scale operations in chinese e-commerce contexts, taught one of the largest chinese supply chain manufacturers in the world a new view on Data Science for their organization, worked with a mexican insurance company to help them understand how to apply technology and new business models to drive toward breakthrough innovation and some other things as well.

I’m very excited about the overall potential for HTM technologies and Matt, you in particular, have been phenomenal! So, thank you.

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Hi all,

Roberto Becerra, from Mexico.

Interesting to read the introductions of very interesting people!

I am also an artist and a technologist. Studied engineering and later acoustics and music tech postgraduate. But my goal has been becoming more and more to use knowledge and the technique for the creation of pieces that serve as communication, exploration of ideas and dialogue.

Been interested in Numenta for almost a year now since I started researching it for an art project in which I used NuPIC to analyze audio to show the reactiveness of a system in the context of language. Notice, not language processing.

To be honest, ever since I started dwelling in the train of thought of this technology, or I must say, algorithm, I started having lots of understanding and ideas about the way we process information, how language works, how we create meaning, and movement, and more interestingly, in the way ideas evolve, language evolves and culture as a body of ethereal knowledge is carried and loaded into our brains by means of these abstraction layers. Fascinating!

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Hi I’m Jonathan,

I’m a CS PhD student in Australia, my work is focused on analysing road traffic data. Initially I used data from vehicle detectors beneath the road to infer incidents and other anomalous behaviour. My proof of concept used nupic as the main engine and won the 2015 HTM Hackathon. There’s still plenty of room for improvement there, but now I’ve moved onto a similar project using IoT devices to track people movement around a city. Hopefully I’ll be able to use HTM to detect anomalous people movement!

I fully expect that we can eventually replicate a human brain’s operation inside a computer given enough resources and accurate algorithms.

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Hi all!

My name is Stan. I’m from Bulgaria, by way of NYC and Boston, and I live in San Francisco. I studied electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, where I got interested in brains, AI, and computational science.

I found out about Numenta in 2009 or 2010 from one of my friends who had interned there. I read On Intelligence and interned there myself in the summer of 2010. At the time, we were focusing on computer vision and learning transformation-invariant visual features. We started a reading group to go through Hubel’s “Eye, Brain, and Vision.” I helped prototype some of the spatial pooling algorithms. I bugged Jeff and Subutai with lots of questions. It was a great summer!

After I finished school, I worked at Twitter for a few years, where I built systems that detect trends and breaking news, and studied networks and user safety. More recently, I worked at a company that applies deep learning to medical image diagnosis. Now I am working on training machines to generate music, and other independent projects in AI.

I am particularly interested in mastering the recent advances in neural networks and understanding how the popular deep learning methods relate to more biologically plausible approaches like HTM.

Cheers!
Stan

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Hello! I’m Andreas and currently live in vienna. I came across HTM-theory 1 year ago during research for a formal description of “intelligence”. The theory makes a lot of sense for me and gives a much more realistic explanation how the brain could work than I have seen so far. To get a better understanding I created the old Temporal Pooler in Matlab (at this time I didn’t understand the difference between the old and new Temporal Pooler). Also I have read the most papers on HTM-theory posted in this forum (when it starts with too much neuroscience I’m lost).

Recently I finished a master in applied mathematics and now I’m working on several projects with friends. One of the projects is to figure out how to define concepts like predictions, stability, hierarchy, information in relation to SDR’s and how to put them together for a perception model (for machines). Also I’m working on an implementation of this concepts but until now it’s more theoretical. In the future, I want to work in a startup based on HTM and other ML techniques to create problem-specific intelligent systems.

I’m always looking for people to talk about HTM and AI from a formal and algorithmic perspective. If anyone in Europe wants to meet some day to exchange ideas or work together on some projects, contact me:)

Andreas

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hi , Andreas, haven’t talk to you for a long time, I just finish my final exam, and start to work on my project again , hope to talk to you more about ML : )

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Greetings! I am Thaddeus. I work in Web accessibility. Almost all of my
work relates to the UI layer of the Web. I would like to get involved in
complex development and research and the use of HTM theory for its
application in accessibility and social responsibility. I am very new to
this area and am looking for ways to get acclimated and start become
educated in this area. Any information on groups, classes or involvement
online or in SF to help me get started is much appreciated.

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Wow, this looks like an awesome community of passionate, knowledgeable people from all over the globe. I hesitate to speak for others, but I think we’re all here because we share the vision of a prosperous, amazing, and safe future for mankind through AI technologies. It warms my heart.

A little backstory: Three years ago I graduated with a degree in EE with an extreme interest in robotics. Back then I developed a 23 degree of freedom 3D printed robotic hand. My mission was to eventually create a company around advanced robotics technologies and make a lot of money. Looooots of money.

Well, turns out that’s not my path! There’s a Japanese concept of “ikigai” or "reason for being, which is the forging of one’s passion, mission, profession, and vocation. About a year ago I found my ikig(AI) :laughing: and matured my purpose, simply to grow stronger and empower others.

Today I live my purpose by devouring knowledge, working on code(implementing my own HTM!), and mentoring a local high school FIRST robotics team. Although I’m not getting paid for my dreams yet (and thus lacking a corner of that ikigai concept) I know I am a devoted, intelligent, and generative man. Eventually my journey through life wherever it leads will really make a difference in people’s lives.

Really glad to be here and I’m looking forward to learning all that I can and hopefully contributing something meaningful to the AI field and Numenta.

Dave

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“I must caution you ahead of time that my book can only be understood
through practicing the method, and not by just reading it. This is
necessary because of a built-in limitation of the human mind.”

A limitation that is typically best considered a feature, not a bug.
Follows directly from HTM theory as presented in On Intelligence (not as
currently implemented in NuPic).

I’m beginning to suspect that many of us have not actually read On
Intelligence. I’ll try to make a brief summary of the dreaded P-word
sections.

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Thanks for your mentorship. As someone new, this is my first time reading
the book. Any supplementary material that reinforces the learning from
reading the book is much appreciated.

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Hi, I’m Carsten, and I live and work in Germany. I read On Intelligence right after it came out. At that time I was a researcher working on Semantic Web technologies, so somewhat related but based on completely different principles. As things are, l was distracted by everyday work and almost forgot about On Intelligence, until last year, when I saw a talk at Scala Days 2015 about spatial pooling. A few weeks later when I was trying to learn more about deep learning I again stumbled upon numenta and HTMs. Since then I try to better understand the theory and application. I currently work for a company that provides products around time series management and analysis in different fields, so HTMs are quite interesting for us. Besides that I was always fascinated by how intelligence works and how we could make computers more intelligent. That’s why I also enjoy learning about and working on these topics in my spare time.

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Hello, I’m Charles Rosenbauer. I’ve had an interest in AI, neuroscience, and robotics for as long as I can remember. I was looking into some things with machine learning and AI a couple years ago, and decided to buy some random books on the subject off Amazon, just happening to buy On Intelligence because it had some good reviews and sounded kind of interesting.

While I would by no means consider myself an expert in machine learning, I’ve noticed a lot of similarities between HTM and Deep Learning, with a lot of experimental Deep Learning stuff starting to look really similar to HTM with just different neurons and without columns. I’ve got a lot of little experiments I’d like to run with these two to see to what extent they can overlap. Unfortunately I’ve been too busy with school to work on it much in the past, and while I’m finishing up my last year of it next week, I’m also in the process of starting a business, so I’ll likely be busy for a while yet.

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Hi,

I’m Napo Mokoetle from Johannesburg, South Africa. I’ve been working with IBM Tivoli Monitoring, HP BSM and Splunk to mention but a few tools I’ve used in my 16 years in IT. I’m here to learn about HTM as I’m interested in Monitoring As A Service being crafted for Openstack.

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Hello guys!

FIRST and foremost thank you for putting this forum together. I have been waiting this format forever!

Anyway my name is Mohamed Bennouf and live in the Bay Area (US) I was raised in France but been in the States since 1988.

I have a passion for AI since I was little kid. 2001 is of course my favorite movie. I then found Jeff’s book and all I could say at the time was WOW! It made some much sense. Eventually Numenta came up with a very easy software (HTM 1.0) and the amazing web services which allowed to experiment with different problems. Loving mobile apps, I was able to for instance combine the two and come up with an app that can learn to recognize couple type of birds and say the name of the bird out loud. That was so much to do :grinning: Here an old video of the system I made:

Recently Numenta came up with a much more powerful algo (CLA) and i have to admit I did not spend much time on it but I can see how powerful it is versus HTM 1.0 The problem is that I was never able to install the software on my Macbook! Even so there is an amazing tutorial video from Numenta. I just cannot understand all the install steps. Time is also a big issue of course. I will LOVE to finally install Nupic and start playing with it like I did with HTM 1.0 and the webservices at the time. That is another reason why I am so much excited about this forum. It will be much easier to ask for help :slight_smile:

One my interest is to use Nupic for machine self diagnostic. One scene that is printed in my brain in the 2001 Space Odyssey was when Hal 9001 told the astronauts that the main antenna on the spaceship was going to fail in 72 hours! I truly believe Nupic can achieve that. A system like that could save a huge amount of money to companies. I am field service engineer (mass spectrometer) so I would love Nupic to help me…

That’s it. Can wait to converse with all the smart people in this forum>

Have a great week all>

Mo

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Hi @mbennouf,

Not to discourage you from installing the Python version (if that’s your thing), but if you like, you can run the Java version (htm.java) which requires no installation? It is the same as NuPIC though it is playing “catch up” since it is primarily community supported.
See the examples and demos here

Matt (@rhyolight) can help you get the Python version running too - especially for MacBooks it should be much simpler.

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Hello all,

My name is Sam Gallagher, and I’m an electrical engineering student at Drexel University. I read On Intelligence when I was in high school a good few years ago, and I really liked it! It has been a favorite book of mine, and I have kept up-to-date to the best of my ability over these last five years or so paying attention to the development of the CLA and nupic. I am not a well-educated PhD or neuroscientist, but I’m a passionate engineer and aspiring inventor. What brought me to really concentrate on HTM is the initial idea of self-driving cars, which I had been planning to work on a couple years ago. I was in high school though, blithely unaware of how cars worked! So I missed that boat somewhat. But here I am, working with HTM even still. I have been writing my own CLA in MATLAB for the past four months or so, though I am not a computer scientist. I still could not be happier with how the program works (almost done with temporal memory, had many issues!) and I hope to be able to put some fine touches on it with the help of this forum.

I can’t wait to work with everyone to learn NuPIC and develop the theory of HTM further!

Sam Gallagher

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Dear all,

My name is Hanbaek, a Ph.D candidate in math at the Ohio State University.
I study distributed algorithms and complex dynamical systems, mainly discrete ones, as known as cellular automata.

I has always been excited about complex systems that can exhibit surprising high-level functions through some non-linear sum of simple local interactions; bird and fish flocking, unison of firefly blinking, and the brain!

When I read On intelligence in my junior year, it totally got me. The Memory-prediction scheme was so elegant a principle for how the brain works. Now we have deeper understanding of how to construct such a pattern-learning complex system; use of SDRs, Encoders, and temporal memory etc., which is really exciting.

As Von Neumann invented cellular automata as a simplified mathematical model for self-replicating organisms, my hope is to construct a (hopefully simple) mathematical system that can learn and predict sequential data and mathematically prove that it really does. This is a long goal and till then I will have to learn a lot from this awesome community and think together with you guys.

Cheers,
Han

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Hi David.

This is a FANTASTIC news! I downloaded the files in:

I can see the Hotgym example for instance but how to run it? I have Xcode install (i do ios apps) so the code opens automatically using xcode but not sure how run it? Do I need to install something else like Eclipse for instance?

In any event, if I do not need to mess with the Pyhton version that would be fantastic :slight_smile:

Thanks again David.

Mo

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Hi @mbennouf,

I have opened a new topic for this, as we should keep this thread on course to be about “introductions”

Cheers,
David

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So sorry :frowning: Yes that makes a lot of sense, thank you!

MO

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