At last, the first release of the Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing (NuPIC) is ready.  I blogged about the Numenta project quite some time ago.  This appears to be a research release and is expected to be used for vision systems, robotics, data mining and analysis, and failure analysis and prediction.

This new framework should provide a nice platform for developing some interesting solutions.  I brought the topic up at GDC 2007 and I can imagine that most every AI developer will be looking at the framework for possible implementation points.  The uses are far reaching and span not only the game arena but also areas like Second Life and Kalliab.

They've provided a piece of demonstration software, called Pictures, which shows us what HTMs can do and can perhaps spark a few new ideas.  Imagine searching all of the pictures in your harddrive for a person, based on a recent photo.  There are many scenarios where this system can identify objects and apply human-like recognition of invariant representations.