I am attending the Cognitive Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop which is organized by the University of Zürich and is being held in Capo Caccia, Sardinia.

The place is fantastic, and the talks are excellent.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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 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.