Jeff Hawkins, who gave the world the PalmPilot in 1996 (I had one of those first little gems) and the founder of Handspring (who gave us the Treo) is now on to looking ot produce a computer based upon his theories of brain functioning.
An interview with Hawkins is available on NPR - NPR : PalmPilot Creator Models Computer on Brain.
Hawkins new company, Numenta , has this as their mission:
I try to stay up on the Artificial Intelligence conversation, so I need to pick up this book along with Kurzweil's Singularity (which is on its way in one of those delicious little brown Amazon.com boxes)Numenta is developing a new type of computer memory system modeled after the human neocortex. The applications of this technology are broad and can be applied to solve problems in computer vision, artificial intelligence, robotics and machine learning. The Numenta technology, called Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM), is based on a theory of the neocortex described in Jeff Hawkins' book entitled On Intelligence (with co-author Sandra Blakeslee).