One of the first things I noticed, when I started reading about Bio-Inspired AI and neuroscience, is the notion that we cannot say that we "really" understand something unless we find a suitable "traditional" mathematical model that approximates it in a way or another.

While reading about Neuroscience, Biology, Bio-inspired Artificial Intelligence and Evolutionary Robotics, I was struck by the fact that it seems like in each of these fields, mathematics is stretched to the point that it is no longer useful to model system complexity. It instead gets in the way of simple and elegant explanations about emergence and models that might be able to link different levels of complexity within a system.

... 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 ...

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.

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.

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 know it, yet I keep making the same mistake.

I have my vision of the future; it's obviously a partial one, but I know it is a plausible one. And yet I keep trying to talk to friends who are not technologists and I try to explain to them this vision; it takes a lot of time and effort, but at the end of the day they are not convinced :-(

So why do I do it? Maybe because I need to be reassured that the vision is correct, but I keep looking in the wrong direction, probably.

Back from the Synthetic Biology (SB) conference in Zurich.

I did not understand most of the details because I lack a biology background, but I came away with a few ideas:
- they are trying to define the boundaries of the field, but they lack the technical tools to lower the barriers of entry (million dollars today); so right now nothing similar to the WWW is going to develop

Tomorrow I'll be in Zurich attending the Synthetic Biology 3.0 conference.

I have not finished reading the Cell Biology book, so I might not understand much, but gotta start somewhere, and I thought a few days in Zurich would not be so bad after all, since in Milan it is very hot now.