... Bio inspired Artificial Intelligence and Bayesian Networks.

In the past few months I met researchers from Rome's CNR, Stanford and EPFL (Lausanne). They are great researchers, all involved in this Bio-Inspired quest.

I like what I am reading, I like brainstorming about it and the idea of applying these techniques to the Net/Web is stimulating ...

Paul Krugman, as most economists today, does not know whether we are going to have a tough recession or not. The question I have is: "What are we supposed to do as individuals in this kind of situation?"

A year ago I sold Tipic Inc., the company that created the largest blogging and community platform in Italy. Now Splinder is handed over and has doubled in users since the sale.

I am now free to go after my interests which are, broadly speaking, Bio Inspired Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience. I would like to meet researchers who are actively working in these fields.

Splinder was born when I met a researcher at a center in Italy, who was working on ideas similar to mine. I believe that in Europe we have a lot of research from which companies can be developed, so if you are working on Bio Inspired AI, or know of someone who is, feel free to contact me.

Completely agree with this: "This means that AdWords ads shown in search results drive Google’s earnings, but Google searches access less than 0.02% of the world’s information. Imagine what the other 99.98% is worth.

Here is the opportunity: how do you eliminate 50% of fraudulent clicks that you pay when you buy a campaign on Google? It seems like also Andre is talking about it too, here and here.

Well, to put things in perspective, 50% seems a lot, but it is not much compared to more than 50% which is lost on TV ads, and who knows how much which is lost on traditional banner ads sold on cpm (cost per thousand banner displayed).

I studied Engineering and graduated with honors, but I must admit that I never liked mathematical analysis, and was never too good at it. I found it as being too abstract and hard to visualize; on the other hand, I loved computer science, it was my second nature, I could naturally visualize it without efforts. My thesis work, when I graduated, was about a simulation of an automatic storage system at a car factory, which I simulated using what are now generically called cellular automata.

A good explanation about what happened with the subprimes ... funny and sad :-)

The average age of Italian politicians is one of the highest in the world. Regardless of their background, either on the left or on the right, Italian politicians have been trying to "regulate" the Internet for a while now. Their latest proposal is to oblige any site or blog owner to register their site if they generically provide information. The registration would be done through a government agency adding more bureaucracy to a country that has so much of it that could export it, were there countries crazy enough to adopt the Italian system.

I personally prefer a bottom up approach to Artificial Intelligence.

I have been having many conversations about this in the past. A few days ago I decided to take sometime off "normal study" and take sometime to browse the Internet querying Google for different keywords.

I stumbled upon this old article which basically summarizes some of the stuff I have been thinking about lately. I do not agree with some of it, but very interesting read nevertheless.

Videos from the Synthetic biology conference in Zurich are now available online.

BTW: with the internet, conferences are not what they used to be. Nowadays it is common to get videos and proceedings, so what's left of the purpose of conferences? Maybe networking and having fun is what's left ... but that again might change in the near future.

We now give it for granted that neurons fire, and basically work (mostly) digitally. It is amazing, though, that they work digitally, given the fact that the incoming patterns they are supposed to work on are not digital.

There is certainly a great incentive in being digital :-)

I spent the past few days hacking my new HP DV6000 Pavillon laptop. It came out with Vista Home Premium but I wanted to use Ubuntu 7.04. It was NOT easy. It seems this laptop uses very new HW (wireless, sound, graphics) so I had to really find a solution for many issues.

The Internet is fantastic. With a good combination of Google searches and Ubuntu Forums, I was able to find out about:
- WUBI (to install Ubuntu directly from Vista, because the CD would hang during installation)
- NVIDIA new drivers
- installing the new Linux Kernel (Gutsy)
- compiling and installing the Alsa drivers

Today I received a book I ordered from Amazon. Principles of neural science is a 1,400+ pages book.

The book is heavy, so heavy that it is almost impossible to carry it in my backpack; I have no idea how many trees have been cut to print it, and how much energy has been used to ship it, but the point is: if a device based on e-ink technology allowed me to read decently on A4 format, I would be more than willing to download a PDF and store many of these "books" in the device.

I managed to install the Numenta framework on my Ubuntu PC. Had to work around a few problems and had to learn some simple Linux and Python commands, but now it works. Feels like 1984 :-)

BTW: I am back to Milan after a brief stop in Cagliari. The weather is not hot, there are very few people around, and many bicycles ... seems like a nice city today!

I finally got to NYC at 10:00 pm local time, 6 hours late on a 5 hours flight, not bad!

We left San Francisco at 8:00 am, but over Chicago, we started flying in circles, and after a few minutes the captain announced that the FAA was not allowing us to approach NYC for bad weather and lack of air slots.

We landed in Chicago, were not allowed out of the plane, because every 30 min we were waiting for the go ahead. Spent 4 hours sitting in a idle plane :-(