Its been quite some time since I posted, I admit. The good news is, I’m back. Another good news is, I found something cool!
Gone are the days when the word artificial intelligence suddenly pulls up neural networks to your mind. Actually, gone are the days of artificial intelligence it seems. Cognitive computing is going to be the norm, or at least I hope so. Simply put, cognitivie computing is mimicing the way we humans think and making computers do the same.
“But I thought that was what artificial intelligence was all about”
Yes and no.
Though cognitive computing might actually qualify as a way of implementing intelligent machines, conventional artificial intelligence was problem specific. There was usually a separate “learning phase” where we have to feed tons of data to the supposedly intelligent machine. Cognitive computing is a significant improvement on this considering that these machines can learn online. That is, there is no separate learning phase. The machine learns as it work, just like we humans do.
Numenta is a company that deals with the above said “stuff”. They have built a platform (or is it a software?) called nupic (numenta platform for intelligent computing) which implements something known as hierarchichal temporal memory (HTM). And it uses a cortical learning algorithm (CLA) to mimic human brain. Basically, the nupic functions more or less like how we do.
Enough boring theory.
Visit numenta and nupic here : http://numenta.org/
The nupic is open source and you can get the source on github :
https://github.com/numenta/nupic
A warning though. The nupic has a steep learning curve. So get your hands dirty only if you have some time and patience. I couldn’t run the tests on the build (to check if nupic installed correctly) successfully and is still asking around for solutions (the mailing list is great).
And they have some awesome videos of previous hackathons and example programs that clearly demonstrates the power of nupic. Here’s a link.
Kevin Martin Jose 