Pentti Kanerva (born 1937) is a Finnish-born American neuroscientist and the originator of the sparse distributed memory model. He is responsible for relating the properties of long-term memory to mathematical properties of high-dimensional spaces and compares artificial neural-net associative memory to conventional computer random-access memory and to the neurons in the brain. This theory has been applied to design and implement the random indexing approach to learning semantic relations from linguistic data. Kanerva was also the first to use a computer clipboard to preserve deleted texts. The operation would later come to be known as cut, copy, and paste. Source: Wikipedia (en)