Rensselaer To Host Lecture by Jeff Hawkins
Suffice to say, I’m stoked. This has been a good last two weeks in terms of seminars. First Cori Bargmann stops by to talk to us about her fascinating work on C. Elegans, then Kathryn Anderson shows up and gives a wonderful talk on her recent work. Now, when I didn’t think life could get any better, Jeff Hawkins is coming to town. It’s like Christmas, but with more neuroscience and less fruitcake.
RPI: News & Events - Rensselaer To Host Lecture by PalmPilot Inventor Jeff Hawkins
Jeff Hawkins, best known as the co-founder of the Palm and Handspring companies and as the architect of computing products such as the PalmPilot and Treo smartphone, will be on the Rensselaer campus Wednesday, Nov. 14 to discuss a new technology platform based on a theory of the human neocortex.
Jeff Hawkins
It will also be webcast live at: the Vollmer Fries Lecture Web site. Be sure to check it out, Jeff Hawkins is one of the movers and shakers of the artificial intelligence field. He has some interesting theories (presented in his book, On Intelligence). Some I agree with, others I don’t. it should be an interesting lecture. I’ll post my notes afterwards.
December 2nd, 2007 at 12:08 pm
Did you attend this? I just came across your blog and I’m interested to know if what you thought of Hawkins’ talk.
December 3rd, 2007 at 7:03 pm
Yes, I attended this lecture. It was a very good lecture. Hawkins is a very persuasive speaker and quite enjoyable to listen to. The lecture was essentially an overview of his book, unfortunately. There was very little new material presented.
He covered his theories of hierarchical modeling and integrating spatial-temporal data. There was less emphasis on prediction than he made in his book, but that was probably for brevities sake. His lecture covered basic neuroscience (there were more comp-sci attendees than biologists) and then moved into the comp-sci realm of his adventure.
There was a small plug for Numenta at the end, detailing a little bit about their work there.
All in all, it was a very interesting lecture. There was considerable grumbling from several attendees after the lecture, claiming Hawkins was rehashing old ideas. In a way he is, but I think he is coming at it with more neuroscience background than previous attempts - which is why most traditional “AI” attempts have failed.
On the same hand though, I still don’t think he is involving enough biological aspects in his modeling. He will probably succeed at creating something more adept than we have today, but I doubt it will be flexible enough for adaptation to many fields.