Pentti Kanerva is a Research Scientist at UC Berkeley's Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience. He came to Stanford from Finland in 1967 to work in Patrick Suppes' computer laboratory, designing and building systems used in computer-assisted instruction. Kanerva's lifelong interest in understanding brains in computing terms motivates his study of computation with high-dimensional vectors. His PhD thesis in Philosophy was published in the book, Sparse Distributed Memory (MIT Press), and led to research at the NASA Ames Research Center, Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Redwood Neuroscience Institute, and, currently, at the Redwood Center. This research has been published in papers on Binary Spatter Code, Random Indexing, and Hyperdimensional Computing.