The Dawn

For centuries people were fascinated with the brain and tried to understand how it might work. Real scientific research has started about 100 years ago. With the emergence of Artificial Intelligence movement in the mid 50th of the previous century there was a hope that the answer to the question of how to build intelligent machines was just round the corner. Today in 2015 the hopes of forerunners of AI community still remain the same as in the beginning.

New insights and the theory

Things started to change back in 2005 when ‘On Intelligence‘ the book written by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee provided an outline of the theory that for the first time explained the inner workings of the neocortex with a small number of biologically inspired assumptions. In the years to come predictions that followed from Jeff`s theory of the possible neocortex algorithm proved to be sound and fruitful and reinforced the theory.

Numenta

The year the ‘On Intelligence’ was published another significant event took place and that was the founding of Numenta company. The main goal of the company was and still is to implement the proposed algorithm of neocortex inner workings in practical applications.

Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing

Very soon Numenta has decided to open source their research implementations of the neocortex algorithm which is known as Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) and Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing (NuPIC) was born. Today, hundreds of NuPIC Open Source Community members along with Numenta development team are engaged in implementation and refinement of Cortical Learning Algorithm (CLA) that is a subset of HTM.

How to contribute

There is a number of ways in which it is possible to contribute.

1. Get involved in NuPIC Open Sources Community and help to develop next step in biologically inspired Machine Intelligence. Maybe you`ll be the one who propose groundbreaking application of this technology in new surprising fields.
2. Play with already existing applications, such as Grok which is used by Amazon.
3. Have fun.