In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Francisco Webber, founder of Cortical.io, a startup that is applying tools based on Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) to natural language understanding. While HTM has been around for more than a decade, there aren’t many companies that have released products based on it (at least compared to other machine learning methods). Numenta, an organization developing open source machine intelligence based on the biology of the neocortex, maintains a community site featuring showcase applications. Webber’s company has been building tools based on HTM and applying them to big text data in a variety of industries; financial services has been a particularly strong vertical for Cortical.