This is old news but I've only just noticed that Numenta have released their whitepaper about HTM (called Hierarchical Temporal Memory - Concepts, Theory, and Terminology). Numenta is the company that Jeff Hawkins formed with Dileep and others to create products around the ideas in his 'On Intelligence' book.

In short: Hawkins believes he's got a pretty good idea of how human intelligence works, and it's actually not very complicated. Numenta is attempting to build workable models based on these ideas to sell to punters for solving various intelligence related problems.

Actually there's not much here that hasn't been covered before in his book and in the previous technical papers by Dileep and Hawkins. Also felt there was a more of a 'corporate whitepaper' feel to this document than any of the previous stuff which was a shame.

Having said that it's still well worth a read, particularly if you haven't come across the material before. The whole layman-accessibility of the HTM ideas serve as a fantastic motivator for getting into artificial intelligence, particularly for engineers working in software who have previously written off AI as a field for ivory towered professors detached from reality.

If Hawkins is even vaguely near the mark you can expect to see this AI stuff become really important very soon.