Recently in books Category

A few years ago, when I read the recently released On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, I was, to say the least fascinated, if not downright inspired. Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the Palm Pilot and Handspring Treo, had codified and clearly explained recent results in our understanding of how the brain works, and in particular how memory could be modeled in the neocortex.

In the book, Hawkins not only provides an overview of recent work, but combines and extends these ideas into a concrete hypothesis for effectively modeling neocortex brain function. These ideas have been formalized into a whitepaper. Hawkins published the book in 2004, and a year later formed a company called Numenta (along with long-time business partner Donna Dubinsky and technologist Dileep George) to help translate these ideas into reality.

When I first heard about Numenta, I was skeptical about its viability. It's certainly a noble goal to make practical the theoretical ideas outlined in the book, and nothing would lend more credibility to these ideas than commercial success. However, the ideas/concepts seem to be fairly low level from the perspective of building commercial solutions. Say, for example, that I build a commercially viable image recognition system based on the toolkit provided by Numenta. Is it likely that a great deal of IP would be attributable to the toolkit? Or to the concepts underlying Hawkins' program (something called HTM)? If it's the latter, then really Hawkins is commercializing the concept (I have doubts about the former.) HTM can be defined as a type of Bayesian network. It's not clear that patenting these concepts would not run afoul of previous academic research into brain function (recall that really these concepts were known previously, the contribution here was aggregating them into a practical whole.)

In any case, in a recent press release, DARPA has announced that it has awarded a $4.9M grant to Lockheed Martin to develop just such a program. This brings great credence to what Numenta is doing, and outlines a fairly clear path to success. Now more than ever, this book may be worth a read!

Yesterday I saw the movie No Country For Old Men based on the novel of the same title by Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy is my favorite living author, so I had been looking forward to this, although after what Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz had done to "All the Pretty Horses", I had some concerns. "No Country For Old Men" was, however, directed by the Coen brothers, so I had some hope.

In short, the film did not disappoint. Most inspiring was the bringing to life of the character Anton Chigurh, the mass-murdering anti-christ that provides the vehicle for McCarthy to set the philosophical underpinnings of the story. Chigurh is played by Javier Bardem, and it would not be a surprise if he were to win a best supporting role Oscar for this work.

The film (and the novel) are not for everyone. The theater was nearly full the other night, and a good part of the crowd actually booed at the end (although my guess is that this was mostly for the abrupt ending, true to the novel to the letter, no hollywood, feel-good resolution here.)

A year or so ago, I read a fascinating book by mathematician Peter Woit entitled Not Even Wrong, subtitled "The Failure of String Theory and the Continuing Challenge to Unify the Laws of Physics".

Woit makes a compelling argument characterizing the current field of theoretical particle physics as a cult devoted nearly exclusively to following string theory despite the fact that the theory has failed over the past thirty years to make any real progress in going beyond the standard model. Thirty years later, it still appears that graduate students are advised that they leave the field at their peril.

This story is personally relevant as I earned my Ph.D. in string theory from the University of California at Berkeley in the fall of 1992, and have had similar suspicions since leaving the field. This is the first time, however, that I have seen the arguments so cleanly laid out. It certainly has been frustrating to sit by and watch as proponents of the field (such as Brian Greene and Michio Kaku) continue to speak overly optimistically about the progress being made in the field.

A great read!