Understanding ...

That feeling when you understand a discovery you made years ago. That feeling when you understand what discovery means. That feeling when you understand what understanding means. That feeling when you understand what meaning means.

Philosophy matters

That feeling when you realize that Aristotle shaped our thinking in subtle ways that are extremely hard to disentangle. The implicit is the enemy of understanding, before defeating it, one must make it explicit.

Theory and constraints

That feeling when you realize that the how follows nicely from the what. Once the theory is in place, it constrains the possible hows and guides to one that finally closes the loops. Spring in Capri.

That feeling ...

That feeling when you realize that Galileo’s vision was perfectly reasonable for his time but applied today it is just a mental prison, a cage. That feeling when you see the cage. That feeling when you step out of the cage. That feeling when you finally understand what the

Virtual reality, the brain and real dizziness

I tried the Climb, a Virtual Reality game for the Oculus headset. The experience is amazing. I felt like I was high above the ground. I felt dizziness even if I knew that I was in a simulation. The rational conscious part of me knew that I was on the

Specification

I am working on a project with some very sharp minded guys. They are helping me write the specifications. The project is a new way of thinking about the Internet, in a bio-inspired way. It rationalizes and reorganizes how data, programs and world objects are logically layered. It will eventually

Moving my blog

I`m in the process of moving my blog to a new hosting provider and a new blogging platform, Ghost. In the next few weeks I'll be copying all the post to the new platform.

Back in Milan

Back in Milan for a couple of days. As usual, the first stop is Chinatown. It is great to see the Chinese community raising money for the earthquake victims in Italy. Italians should think about sending their kids to School here on Sundays to learn about Chinese culture and get

Shifting complexity from modeling to interpreting results

A typical AI problem involves quite a bit of tinkering before the model can start learning. Say you want to recognize objects; you need a fairly large number of pictures depicting the objects and associated labels (the names of the objects). The pictures must be curated, to make sure that

Different perceptions of reality

When attending a neuroscience meeting, one realizes how little we do know about brains. This is strikingly different from the feeling one gets at some AI meetings where even the ethical implications of the singularity are discussed, taking the singularity for granted. Here I'm mostly referring to Silicon

Space: 1999

As a kid, Space: 1999 inspired me - and sometimes scared me. Back in the days, I watched as many episodes as possible, religiously waiting for the next episode to be aired. I don`t recall watching the first episode. I have now, thanks to the Internet. Here is what

A new generation of Internet services

Following up on the previous post, here are some of the problems that should be solved by a new generation of Internet services: * how do I keep information integrated as opposed to integrating different services developed with different objectives? * how do I become aware of the relevant dynamically evolving information