Pentti Kanerva (born 1937[1]) is a Finnish-born American neuroscientist and the originator of the sparse distributed memory model.
[3] This theory has been applied to design and implement the random indexing approach to learning semantic relations from linguistic data.
[9] Kanerva worked in statistics and programming for the Finnish Forest Research Institute, the Finnish State Computer Center, and the University of Tampere, Finland, before emigrating to the United States in 1967.
[9][10][11] He worked for Stanford University as a systems specialist and research assistant before earning his Ph.D. there in 1984.
[9] Kanerva went on to work at NASA's Ames Research Center and the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, before taking a position at the Redwood Neuroscience Institute of the University of California, Berkeley.