|
|
BotSpot® Bi-Weekly Newsletter March 14, 2001 Artificial Intelligence in the Palm of Your Hand Sometimes you don't know where the next big idea will come from. Even if the idea is yours. In January of 1986, a young man named Jeff armed with a degree in electrical engineering and a deep and burning desire to know how the human brain works, left his job at a Silicon Valley software company and entered the halls of University of California, Berkeley to begin studying for his graduate degree in biophysics. This change from business to academic life was not a beginning for Jeff, nor was it an end. It would turn out to be a transition of sorts that would lead him on new and exciting paths of success. At the time, Jeff was consumed with finding an understanding of what our brains do and how they work. In his previous tenure at GRiD Software, he wanted to design a computer that would respond directly to human thought impulses. This passion was so overwhelming that Jeff's wife urged him to enter a university setting, where his drive could be channeled into structured goals. Once at Berkeley, Jeff began to think of human intelligence from two angles. The first approach he undertook was that of memory and how it differs between a human brain and a computer. Despite the inevitable comparisons, computers and the brain are not remotely similar in how they are built and how they function. Computers have processors, software, and RAM to help them work. The brain has none of that, instead relying on something called auto-associative memory. This kind of memory helps human being fill in the gaps when information is incomplete to come up with the total solution. With this knowledge in hand, Jeff could research another tack. Because it has auto-associative memory, the brain can anticipate what's going to happen. It can observe and make predictions on what it has seen. This is how the brain can understand things. Jeff's approach to tackling these two issues was unique to his peers at Berkeley. So unique, in fact that none of his professors would officially support them. In 1988, Jeff left Berkeley without a degree--but definitely with an idea. Building on his research in auto-associative memory, Jeff created a software program that would recognize specific patterns. In this case, the patterns of human handwriting. After rejoining his old company, Jeff's software would be incorporated into a handheld computing device known as the GRiDPad. Later, when Jeff formed his own company, the software would appear again in a similar device known as the Zoomer. Finally, a modified and renamed version of the software would be the key component in one of the most popular computing devices in existence. The software was called PalmPrint, later to be called Graffiti. The man who built it is Jeff Hawkins, founder of Palm Computing, maker of the Palm Pilot series of PDA devices. Even though Hawkins has steered Palm Computing and now his new company Handspring, Inc. to huge commercial success, he has not left his original set of goals behind: to build electronic devices that use auto-associative memory in much the way you and I do. Sometimes you do know
where the next big idea will come from. News Stories DealCatcher
Adds Comparison Shopping EdgeGain
1.1 Released ProFusion The
Locator RumorBot GuruBot IRC
Group Focused on AI, Bots |
