Numenta Is Imitating Your Brain

A startup's approach to advanced pattern recognition could trump rivals' in the hunt to capitalize on finding trends in large streams of data

by Stephen Baker

Through his development of the Palm (PALM) Pilot and Treo smartphone, Jeff Hawkins helped change the way people access information computers. Now he may have come up with a way to alter how we comb through that data.

Hawkins' software startup Numenta is trying to replicate the thinking patterns of the human brain in an effort to recognize subtle patterns in immense streams of data. Researchers, of course, say such tools could lead to advances in data-rich fields from drug discovery to law enforcement.

Help for Data Centers

But perhaps the first industry to benefit from Numenta will be computing itself. In an interview in early July, Hawkins points to one of his company's research projects, an engagement with EDSA, a San Diego-based company that monitors and fine-tunes electricity usage in a host of industries, including data centers. These centers, the heart of data-gobbling companies like Google (GOOG), consume enormous quantities of energy. A U.S. government study predicts that power consumption at data centers, which reached $4.5 billion in 2006, could hit twice that figure by 2011—and far higher if energy prices continue to rise.

These massive brains of the world need ever brainier software to make better use of their power consumption. That's where Numenta comes in. Numenta's software, which is in research trials with partners like EDSA, is based on the brain's neocortex. That's gray matter associated with the higher levels of thinking. The software is designed to pick up the "deeper structures" in the patterns of electrical flows in data centers. In other words, instead of focusing on simple input and output of voltage, it might study the electrical path of each query into a data center.

The way Hawkins describes it, the Numenta system establishes a hierarchy of information. At its lowest level, it feeds on streams of data coming in from sensors. It recognizes patterns in those streams, just as we do when we grapple with the sounds and images that pour into our brains, which we learn to recognize as language or faces. The equivalent to sensory input in the data center would be a crazy quilt of electrical signals streaming among thousands of computers, many of them often working on the same jobs at the same time.

Numenta's system looks for the patterns, Hawkins says, "over space and time." It might see, for example, tiny surges in electrical demand associated with certain types of jobs or communications between specific machines. This analysis is what EDSA Chief Executive Mark Ascolese calls "advanced education."

More Efficient Operations

This, Ascolese hopes, will help EDSA create more sophisticated mathematical models of data center operations, adding more details about the tiniest patterns. EDSA's tools first optimize the flow of electricity in the model and then benchmark it against the live operation. This involves reading the flow "several million times per second, to detect even the slightest deviation and assess downstream implications."

The better companies can analyze their data, the more efficiently they can run energy-hogging data centers. Competing Web giants are out to stockpile as much of the world's information as possible in their data centers. This includes not just Web pages, but also video, maps, blog posts, music—in short, the digital universe. Storing these petabytes of data requires electricity. And plowing through these mountains to find and serve up Web pages or music eats up more of it.