Hello Neal,

I understand your frustration. With so much buzz around deep learning, big
data, etc, on the mainstream machine learning community, it's hard to work
with such a different approach. I see this a real scientific research, and
there is always big risks with projects as such, but if we succeed it will
be a real AI progress. Note also that there are many interesting brain
features that are yet to be incorporated into the CLA (such as motor
action, hierarchy, feedback).

I don't know if you read this thread, but I applied the CLA to a real-world
dataset that was used on a serious competition, achieving an error that
would put me around the third place (note that it's a somewhat unfair
comparison since I had the test data at my disposal):

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.ai.nupic/1047

Considering it was my first time using the new NuPIC and I didn't spend a
lot of time on it, I consider it to be a good, even surprising, result. I
believe we will see much more interesting applications later on, we either
have to be patient or actually work on them. This NuPIC version is really
new, I even had difficulties getting it running, so we're not talking about
a mature technology (even though the algorithm is a few years old), but
rather a very young one.

Pedro.



On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 4:52 AM, Ian Danforth <[email protected]>wrote:

> Neal,
>
>  Which application domain are you most interested in? Remember that NuPIC
> has been used almost exclusively internally by Grok/Numenta until very
> recently, and so on a limited set of tasks around prediction and anomaly
> detection the technology are much more mature. In most other areas there
> haven't been more than tech demos implemented. The kind of extensive use,
> methodology and rigor it sounds like you're looking for probably won't
> happen until the code base is a bit cleaner and easier to use. It would be
> useful to know what you expected NuPIC to be 'doing' so the community can
> provide entry points and demonstrations that serve the audience you
> represent.
>
> Ian
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 7:50 PM, Neal Donnelly <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Hey everyone -
>>
>> I got involved with NuPIC with starry eyes after reading the CLA
>> whitepaper. The abstractions that it describes are exciting and the level
>> of work that was obvious in the codebase were very compelling. I was mildly
>> concerned that there were no results presented, but I was told that was
>> because there are no established metrics for measuring its performance
>> since it's so novel.
>>
>> Now, after mucking around in the network engine codebase for a while,
>> I've realized that the abstractions presented in the CLA whitepaper seem to
>> have little bearing on the implementation. Spatial and temporal pooling are
>> accomplished as separate types of regions, which are composed not of cells
>> but of Nodes, which are themselves comprised of elements...?
>>
>> This confusion has left me wondering why I believe in this project if
>> neither theory nor results back up the implementation. This line of
>> thinking has left me frustrated that I can't find a single result of NuPIC
>> actually *doing* anything. When none of the existing benchmarks are
>> fitting, researchers invent a new one. I realize I've seen no learning
>> curves, no applications to real data, no demonstrations of performance of
>> any kind.
>>
>> My hope is that this will provoke a flood of links and papers that I
>> missed. My fear is that I've been terribly naive to assume that NuPIC would
>> work when there aren't results out front and center.
>>
>> Thanks.
>> Neal Donnelly
>>
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>>
>>
>
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>


-- 
Pedro Tabacof,
Unicamp - Eng. de Computação 08.
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