I'll be in the Bay Area for a month. This time in Mission. I like the neighborhood so far :-)

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 :-(

The last 2 weeks in the Bay Area have been really productive. The quality and quantity of people that I met is really impressive.

I like technology, so I guess that's the place where it makes sense to be for me. The reality, though, is that it is not just about technology, but also about vision and being able to discuss about the future without limits, either cultural, ideological, or you name it. Not everybody here is this way, but some are, and that's what counts in the end.

I'll be there tomorrow in San Francisco.

This week I attended the AAAI (Artificial Intelligence) conference in Vancouver.

I was a bit disappointed because I did not find much Artificial Intelligence, but rather a lot of Human Intelligence applied to solve specific problems with the aid of computers. I found a lot of mathematics and logic and a top down approach to task solving, but very little talk about bottom up Artificial Intelligence.

I am in Vancouver at a conference on artificial intelligence. Right now I am part of a workshop about Evaluating Architectures for Intelligence.

There is very little agreement on the subject, which in a way confirms the fact that AI has still a long way to go to create a framework for intelligence. Very interesting stuff ...

I am spending a few days in NYC, visiting old friends and enjoying NY City life. Saturday I'll be flying to Vancouver; never been there, looking forward to get there.

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.