"This has been a long personal endeavor of mine. Twenty-five years ago ... I just fell in love with brains. ... I decided to dedicate my life to it. It has been a long road, it's up and down, it's actually not an easy thing to do, to say I'm going to work on large-scale theories of brain function. It was not something you could do in the 1980s. There was no place you could go. ... Nobody was doing the large-scale theory. That's changed in only recent years and I started my institute, the Redwood Neuroscience Institute, to create a place where you could focus on this problem. And, I think, that's really all it took." -Jeff Hawkins
Jeff Hawkins (born June 1, 1957 in Huntington, New York) is the founder of Palm Computing (where he invented the Palm Pilot)and Handspring (where he invented the Treo). He has since turned to work on neuroscience full-time and has founded the Redwood Neuroscience Institute and published On Intelligence describing his memory-prediction framework theory of the brain. In 2003 he was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering "for the creation of the hand-held computing paradigm and the creation of the first commercially successful example of a hand-held computing device."