by Brian Mulconrey

Thursday, August 17 2017 - It was ten years ago today that an innovative little think-tank that has since become a household name launched an ambitious and well funded program aimed at "Teaching the Internet to Dream." What this actually meant for the companies and government agencies that sponsored this research was that we invented a method whereby the Internet could take advantage of the same processes that the human mind employs during sleep (and while awake) to process and organize the experiences of the day into memory hierarchies.

This project grew out of two major developments that went largely unnoticed in popular media at the time. First, on March 5, 2007, Jeff Hawkins (founder of Palm, Inc.) announced that his new company Numenta, Inc. was launching NuPIC (the Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing). This research release was the first time that the world experienced "hierarchical memory systems" outside of the human cortex. This powerful software architecture provided the foundation for creating cortex-like memory hierarchies for the Internet. The next major development came four days later on March 9, 2007 when technology innovator Danny Hillis announced the launch of Freebase - the first public tool for use by computers to search other computers over the Internet.

The last major piece of the puzzle was completed as part of the project. Working with a team of researchers at MIT, the project created the Semantic Scoring Algorithm (SSA) that allowed computer programs to create and update "relationships" between seemingly disparate pieces of digital information.

By the summer of 2009 the first Internet Dreams HTM's were deployed. Within 18 months, the insights gained from these embryonic memory hierarchies startled the world. And, as we all know, that was just the beginning…

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