On the way to the Numenta HTM Challenge…

October 5, 2015 cogmission
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Greetings Earthlings (and otherwise affiliated)…

 

While the general point of this blog is to share observations, insights and musings during my investigation into HTM (Hierarchical Temporal Memory) technology – to chronicle my learning process and help others who are struggling to understand HTM technology along with me, the first few posts will be dominated by talk surrounding the Numenta HTM Challenge.

In the past, Numenta has held 48 hour Hackathons in various locations around the U.S. which are really great gatherings and produce very interesting hacks which demonstrate the power of HTM technology – but are somewhat limited due to the brief amount of time available to develop them.

The current hackathon is arranged a bit differently. This time hackers will have approximately 48 days (Sep 18 – Nov 6, 2015) to develop their hacks, which should make for more elaborate application submissions and some interesting hacks to be sure!

So I talked to Matt Taylor (the Numenta flag-bearer/Developer liaison for the Numenta Community) about wanting to create a Java version of Numenta’s GEO Tracking application, but make it a touch more useable by making it standalone (no web server required) with no pre-processing of data. My hope is to be able to add more features to make it easier to use and a bit more enhanced (it will be already able to run on just about any environment by virtue of its Java heritage anyway). Matt thought it would make a great HTM Challenge submission and encouraged me to enter it in the challenge. So here we are…

Down to the nitty-gritty… enter Nostromo

So I spent some time looking around for Java libraries I could use to implement a GEO Tracking application in Java, and I found two very useful APIs. These were the Google Maps API which responds with textual information but no JavaFX UI handling, and the GMapsFX API which has a JavaFX UI API but not all the functionality I needed. So what I am ending up with is the opportunity to develop an API which is essentially a wrapper around the aforementioned but with a unified object model that abstracts the two (along with some additional functionality of course).

Basically I have to first create FXMaps, a JavaFX mapping API first – before even getting to Nostromo… Huh boy…

So far FXMaps has much of its object model built out and has a reference implementation that can be used to display a map, enter in waypoints by clicking on the map (in Simulation Mode) and saving the “map” to disk so that it can be reloaded when restarting the app. I will continue updating the reference implementation as the API gets flushed out, so anybody who’s interested can play with it and monitor its development. (just run ai.cogmission.fxmaps.demo.RefImpl.java).

Anyway, so yesterday I added the ability to load GPX files directly from the example app! GPX (GPS exchange format) is a GPS format which is outputted by mapping applications you can run on your smart phone! You can record a route; save it and then point to it from within the FXMaps demo app and eventually Nostromo.

Anyway, I hope you find this site both interesting and useful – and I hope you enjoy the process of learning about HTMs with me – it will be nice to have company during what I expect to be a long and very interesting journey!

Please feel free to leave comments, criticisms, hissings and guffaws below… 😉

 

 

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