Numenta On Intelligence

Dr. Konrad Kording is a professor at University of Pennsylvania, known for his contributions to the fields of motor control, neural data methods, and computational neuroscience. He runs the Kording Lab, or K-Lab, which focused on computational neuroscience early on and now focuses on causality in data science applications. His lab has made an impact across many fields over time, including Bayesian brains, causal effects in human behavior, and uncertainty in the brain.

In this episode, Matt Taylor interviews Dr. Kording over Skype to discuss illusions of perception, how uncertainty might be represented in the brain, and more. A video of their conversation is available on the HTM School YouTube channel.

After a couple episodes of deep neuroscience, co-host Christy Maver takes us back to the business side of things in an interview with Numenta CEO Donna Dubinsky. They discuss the challenge of navigating a dual mission, why she believes it’s important even for non-neuroscientists to understand how the brain works, and where she believes the company is going. 

Blake Richards is Assistant Professor and Associate Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). Author of the papers, “Toward deep learning with segregated dendrites” and “The Persistence and Transience of Memory,” Blake answers questions about how deep learning models can incorporate segregated dendrites, whether loss functions pertain to the neocortex and what it means to identify as a theoretical neuroscientist.

Alex Vaughan is a scientist and entrepreneur, founder of MapNeuro, Inc. He’s been working at Zador Lab on groundbreaking new ways of tracking neurons and mapping them. In this episode, Alex talks about the molecules in your brain and how they control you. he describes how viruses are used as a delivery mechanism for brain mapping barcodes. You’ll also find out how your brain is like a subway.

It’s not easy to map the brain, but we’re starting to understand how, thanks to many fields of science contributing to our current technological toolset. Listen in to figure out how all fields of science are connected, and how business and science can be used together to better understand the brain and intelligence.

Podcast host Christy Maver interviews Francisco Webber, CEO and Co-founder of Cortical.io. Cortical.io is a strategic partner of Numenta that specializes in natural language understanding. In this episode, Francisco talks about the spark that started it all for him while watching a YouTube video of our Co-founder, Jeff Hawkins, the advantages of their patented semantic folding methodology over other machine learning, statistical-based approaches, and the many natural language use cases the company addresses.