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Recently, Sun has been running an intriguing double-page spread print campaign with various of their technical luminaries standing in a field, Hands-Across-America style. Some depictions are a bit disingenuous (Bill Joy), some are not as flattering as they could be, and some, indeed, are eyebrow-raising “Oh yeah, I guess so-and-so really is still there!”

This has intersected with Gary Anthe’s latest from-the-labs report in ComputerWorld. I believe he’s written several of the other lab profiles we’ve pointed to in the past. The following review is courtesy of ACM’s TechNews clipping service. In the extended entry, we’ve excerpted a bit on Vipul Gupta’s work with miniaturizing emedded SSL web servers using ECC…

Sun’s R&D Spectrum Computerworld (06/06/05) P. 29; Anthes, Gary H. Plus sidebar on supercomputing

Sun Microsystems employs some 200 scientists with more than $80 million to spend annually on a wide variety of next-generation computing projects, including a possible 4-PFLOP supercomputer and a Web server the size of a quarter. Sun’s Proximity I/O technology, for example, will enable computer chips to fully maximize their potential computing power so that top-tier Internet switches can be built at dimensions and costs similar to PCs; currently, Internet switches cost millions of dollars and fill entire rooms, but Proximity I/O eliminates wire interconnects and the data-transfer bottlenecks associated with them. “When processors went from 10MHz to 3GHz, they didn’t become 30 times faster because the bandwidth didn’t increase by 30 times; it increased by two or three times,” notes Sun Labs researcher Robert Drost. Sun leveraged the potential of Proximity I/O to win a DARPA bid to design and build the next generation of supercomputer architecture. Sun, IBM, and Cray won the three $50 million contracts, and one project will be chosen for actual production by 2009. Proximity I/O would enable massively parallel computation between large numbers of processors, lifting the sustained speeds of that machine above 1PFLOP, possibly scaling to 4PFLOPS. On the other end of the computing spectrum, Sun has developed secure, coin-size Web servers that could be deployed in battlefield sensors, on personal medical devices, or RFID tags used for confidential situations, and Sun’s elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) is key to this effort because it dramatically reduces computing requirements compared to RSA cryptography while maintaining similar security.

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Jeff Hawkins, as most of the digerati knows, has been developing his theory of human intelligence for a while now, and recently founded a non-profit research institute to pursue it with visiting researchers and sponsored graduate students. Redwood, in the Kepler’s Books building in Menlo Park, appears to remain quite separate from this venture, but the spinoff theme seems quite appropriate.

In related WSJ coverage, they report that Bruce Dunlevie of Benchmark, a past backer, and Harry Saal, a past CommerceNet supporter, are on their board — less for the money, as one might imagine with Hawkins and Dubinsky involved, than for the connections and business development challenges that await them. I suspect they’re on the right track to conceive of this as a platform play that needs open developer support first and foremost. Good luck!

A New Company to Focus on Artificial Intelligence

Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky will remain involved with what is now called PalmOne, but on Thursday they plan to announce the creation of Numenta, a technology development firm that will conduct research in an effort to extend Mr. Hawkins’s theories. Those ideas were initially sketched out last year in his book “On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines,” co-written with Sandra Blakeslee, who also writes for The New York Times.

Dileep George, a Stanford University graduate student who has worked with Mr. Hawkins in translating his theory into software, is joining the firm as a co-founder.

Mr. Hawkins has long been interested in research in the field of intelligence, and in 2002 he founded the Redwood Neuroscience Institute. He now spends part of his time there while continuing to serve as chief technology officer of PalmOne.

Artificial intelligence, which first attracted computer scientists in the 1960’s, was commercialized in the 1970’s and 1980’s in products like software that mimicked the thought process of a human expert in a particular field. But the initial excitement about machines that could see, hear and reason gave way to disappointment in the mid-1980’s, when artificial intelligence technology became widely viewed as a failure in the real world.

In recent years, vision and listening systems have made steady progress, and Mr. Hawkins said that while he was uncomfortable with the term artificial intelligence, he believed that a renaissance in intelligent systems was possible.

He said that he believed there would soon be a new wave of software based on new theoretical understanding of the brain’s operations.

“Once you know how the brain works, you can describe it with math,” he said.

Mr. Hawkins acknowledged, however, that full-scale applications of his theoretical approach had not yet been developed or proved . Mr. Hawkins is now demonstrating a pattern-recognition application using a version of his software. It allows a computer to correctly identify a line drawing of a dog from many different patterns. Commercial uses for the technology might include speech recognition for telephone customer service or vision systems for quality control in factories.

Initially, the company will offer free licenses to the Numenta software to permit experimentation and help build a research community to develop the technology, Ms. Dubinsky said.