Pentti Kanerva is a research affiliate at the Redwood Neuroscience Institute, and is the originator of the

sparse distributed memory Sparse distributed memory (SDM) is a mathematical model of human long-term memory introduced by Pentti Kanerva in 1988 while he was at NASA Ames Research Center. It is a generalized random-access memory (RAM) for long (e.g., 1,000 bit) binary words. ...

model.Kanerva, Pentti. Sparse distributed memory. MIT press, 1988. He is responsible for relating the properties of long-term memory to mathematical properties of high-dimensional spaces and compares artificial neural-net associative memory to conventional computer

random-access memory Random-access memory (RAM; ) is a form of computer memory that can be read and changed in any order, typically used to store working data and machine code. A random-access memory device allows data items to be read or written in almost the ...

and to the neurons in the brain. This theory has been applied to design and implement the Random indexing approach to learning semantic relations from linguistic data.Joshi, Aditya, Johan Halseth, and Pentti Kanerva. "Language Recognition using Random Indexing." arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.7026 (2014).

Education

Kanerva has an A.A. from

Warren Wilson College Warren Wilson College (WWC) is a private liberal arts college in Swannanoa, North Carolina. It is known for its curriculum that combines academics, work, and service as every student must complete a requisite course of study, work an on-campu ...

, M.S. in forestry, with a minor in mathematics and statistics from the

University of Helsinki The University of Helsinki ( fi, Helsingin yliopisto, sv, Helsingfors universitet, abbreviated UH) is a public research university located in Helsinki, Finland since 1829, but founded in the city of Turku (in Swedish ''Åbo'') in 1640 as the ...

, and has a Ph.D. in Philosophy, from Stanford University.

Employment

After earning his Ph.D. at Stanford in 1984, Kanerva moved to work at the

NASA Ames Research Center The Ames Research Center (ARC), also known as NASA Ames, is a major NASA research center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1939 as the second National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) labora ...

. He also worked at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, then finally moving on to his current position at the Redwood Neuroscience Institute located in Berkeley.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kanerva, Pentti American neuroscientists Finnish neuroscientists Living people Year of birth missing (living people)