vision

It's a culture. Call it the algorithmic culture. To get it, you need to be part of it ...

17 March 2010 - 1:14pm — ocrampal

I promise this will be today's last post, otherwise I will not be able to read an interesting paper I received from one of the participants at the AGI conference in Lugano. But I felt compelled to write one more post, because it follows perfectly from the previous two.

This article published on Edge is good food for thought; it is from David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale.

Exponential times, Net/Web and innovation

11 October 2009 - 12:41pm — ocrampal

I was invited to give a talk at Bristol Meyer Squibb for a Marketing Seminar in Paris. The idea was to give a sense of the change happening on the Net/Web, how it affects corporations and what can be done about it.

It was an opportunity to formalize some of my thoughts; if you're interested, the presentation is attached. It is a high level overview, nothing specific. The objective was to explain how fast technology is changing everything.

Books smell good but will not last very long

18 September 2008 - 10:03pm — ocrampal

If you watch this video from the BBC, you will probably agree that books will never be replaced by electronic readers because:
- you can rinse a book after accidentally dropping it in the tub
- book pages do not reflect light like e-readers do when reading at night in your bed
- you do not get mugged for a book, but you could for an e-reader
- books smell good

Be good, it pays :-)

8 May 2008 - 10:23am — ocrampal

This article, by Paul Graham, perfectly describes our state of mind when building Splinder into the largest blogging platform in Italy.

We focused on users, that was our compass, and we focused on usage growth, not on generating revenues, because that would have killed the project. We kept costs down and survived all the business and life odds.

Emergence, physics and God

30 April 2008 - 2:50pm — ocrampal

While thinking about the emergence of "new rules" from simple rules and the inadequacy of mathematics to model across levels, I never thought about the implication of this line of reasoning beyond science and technology into the realm of philosophy and religion.

Housing and technology

7 April 2008 - 11:12am — ocrampal

How is development of communication technologies going to affect house prices?

When "real" virtual reality is available, and when it is almost indistinguishable from physical reality (except for touch and smell), it will make it irrelevant to live in cities like New York or San Francisco. Those cities will not command a price premium in housing any more and house prices will go down, that's one view ...

Instead, the author of this article on the New York Times thinks that the price premium will actually increase, because people still want to stick together, and more so now than before.

Evolution of education and the future of Universities

28 March 2008 - 4:32pm — ocrampal

This is the kind of post I was going to write, if I had time and the writing skills of this guy. In fact I had already started writing it, using a top-down approach, whereas the post I am linking uses a bottom up approach.

Computer technology vs. partial differential equations

29 October 2007 - 12:01pm — ocrampal

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.

Politics

6 August 2007 - 12:53am — ocrampal

Yesterday I was invited at a dinner in San Francisco. The host is a very successful entrepreneur, who now spends most of his time finding money (millions) and setting the vision for the democratic party.

We had a great conversation about world politics, US politics, Italian politics (if it ever existed really :-) ), and compared our visions of the future.

Human "artificial" intelligence

28 July 2007 - 12:34am — ocrampal

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.

Artificial intelligence

22 July 2007 - 8:04pm — ocrampal

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 ...

ocrampal's blog

The future

6 July 2007 - 1:56pm — ocrampal

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.

Ocrampal's blog