Jeff Hawkins Develops a Brainy Big Data Company

Quentin Hardy in the New York Times:

Jeff Hawkins has been a pioneer of mobile devices, a distinguished lecturer in neuroscience, and a published author of a revolutionary theory of how the brain works. If he’s right about Big Data, a lot of people are going to wish he’d never gone into that field.

Mr. Hawkins, who helped develop the technology in Palm, an early and successful mobile device, is a co-founder of Numenta, a predictive software company. Numenta’s technology is based on Mr. Hawkins’s theories of how the brain works, a subject he has studied and published on intensively. Perhaps most important for the technology industry, the product works off streams of real-time information from sensors, not the trillions of bytes of data that companies are amassing.

“It only makes sense to look at old data if you think the world doesn’t change,” said Mr. Hawkins. “You don’t remember the specific muscles you just used to pick up a coffee cup, or all the words you heard this morning; you might remember some of the ideas.”

If no data needs to be saved over a long term and real-time data can stream in all the information that is needed, a big part of the tech industry has a problem.

More here.