Biography
Mr. Jeff Hawkins co-founded Handspring with Donna Dubinsky in July
of 1998 after five years together at Palm Computing. In 1994, he
founded Palm Computing. He is often credited as the designer who
reinvented the handheld market, and has architected many computer
products including the PalmPilot, Visor, and Treo families of handheld
computers and communicators. His vision for handheld computing dates
back to the 1980s, when as vice president of research at GRiD Systems
Corporation he served as principal architect and designer for the
GRiDPad and GRiD Convertible. Prior to that, he held key technical
positions with Intel Corporation. He currently holds nine patents for
various handheld devices and features.
In 2002, he created the Redwood Neuroscience Institute (RNI), a
scientific research institute focused on understanding how the human
neocortex works, and served as its Executive Director and Chairman. RNI
has now become The Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at UC
Berkeley. In 2004, he co-authored On Intelligence that
details his theory of the neocortex. Based on his book, in 2005, he
co-founded Numenta based on a new type of memory architecture,
Hierarchical Temporal Memory, modeled after the mammalian cortex that
can solve problems in pattern recognition and machine learning.
He is a member of the scientific board of directors at the Cold
Spring Harbor Laboratory and he is on the advisory board of the Redwood
Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at University of California at
Berkeley. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2003.
Mr. Hawkins received a bachelors degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University in 1979.
