Dan Hammerstrom at DARPA is working at putting together a DARPA program called the Cortical Processor. So far there was a 1.5 day workshop earlier this year in Wash D.C. and there is another one scheduled for September 18 here in the bay area. I spoke at the earlier one and will be speaking at the upcoming one too. The goal of the program is to create new HW architectures designed specifically to model the neocortex. The two workshops are to help DARPA gather ideas for the program. If all goes well DARPA will formally launch the program around the beginning of the new year. DARPA does not do the actual work, they provide funding for teams that compete to meet a set of goals. Usually these programs run for several years.
Dan sees the CLA as a prime example of the kind of algorithm he would like the Cortical Processor to implement. Dan has a long history building neural network type chips and he understands the CLA deeply, so he knows what he is doing. The NuPIC community can play an important role in this. The fact that the CLA is open sourced helps, the fact that there are people studying the CLA helps, and of course any commercial applications of the CLA helps. As I have said before today is similar to the 1940s in the computing era. Back then they were just starting to understand how to build computers. They had not yet invented operating systems, compilers, transistors, disk drives, and so on, but they had the basic idea of a data store that contained both instructions and data and that this could compute anything. Once the basics were understood, progress was steady. This is where we are today in building intelligent machines. We understand the basics of hierarchy, SDRs, sequence memory, etc. and we are trying to figure out the best way forward. BTW government funding played an important role in the creation of the first computers and I believe Dan Hammerstrom believes DARPA can play a similar role again. Jeff From: nupic [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Matthew Taylor Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2013 9:02 PM To: NuPIC general mailing list. Subject: Re: [nupic-dev] DARPA RFI Jeff wrote a blog post about this, too: http://numenta.org/blog/2013/08/13/brains-and-machine-intelligence-a-long-ti me-coming.html --------- Matt Taylor OS Community Flag-Bearer Numenta On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 8:49 PM, Alexander van Dijk <[email protected]> wrote: Just ran across this article http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/darpa-wants-computers-fuse-higher -human-brain-function which mentions the release (August 14) of an RFI by DARPA asking for "Request for Information (RFI) on Research and Development of a Cortical Processor" https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity <https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=91bc9e58d6fa024d55d7c0 583d38fc21&tab=core&_cview=0> &mode=form&id=91bc9e58d6fa024d55d7c0583d38fc21&tab=core&_cview=0 I couldn't find the same RFI on the DARPA website, but Daniel Hammerstrom is mentioned as the primary POC http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/MTO/Personnel/ Alexander _______________________________________________ nupic mailing list [email protected] http://lists.numenta.org/mailman/listinfo/nupic_lists.numenta.org
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