Do you have any idea how complex a cell is?

Check out this video produced by Harvard University. It is an amazing shot at trying to convey how complex a cell is. What you see is just a simplification of the actual inner workings because, in reality, the elements within the cell are all packed together in a way that

Old / new paper: Science and Complexity

Today I took sometime off to read a classical paper from Weaver: Science and Complexity. The paper was published in 1948, many years before computers were first available at Universities, then on every desk and finally in every pocket. It was also published before DNA was discovered and then sequenced.

About Cognitive Neuromorphic Engineering

The two weeks I spent in Capocaccia were worth the trip. The Cognitive Neuromorphic Engineering workshop, organized by the University of Zurich, is an interesting mix of engineering, science, math and biology. I was there four years ago, when the main topic was the design of the Neuromorphic chips that

Three not so simple questions

This is a rather cryptic post, so bare with me. I just want to remember where I am and maybe get some feedback. Let's get started: 1. Artificial Intelligence and mathematics are about solving problems that have been framed by a programmer or a mathematician. Can an automatic system frame

Italy, now what?

It looks like it is decision time for Italy. The markets will not allow more debt, so it is now about time to take Italy into the current century by restructuring the whole political and economic system. The current economic and political leadership has been resisting change for more than

Making connections vs reducing

What you work on affects your ability to see the world. I haven't had time to write a structured post in a while, mostly because I have been looking into some new technology involving lots of programming. It seems to me that the "programming" state of mind is very different

Sorting out this mess will not be easy

More than one type of re-balancing needed. One of the recurring themes of the current economic crisis is the idea of re-balancing the global economy. But where are the imbalances? Most would think about the West vs. East, or developed vs. developing countries. It is certainly true that those imbalances

How little do we know about Biology and Neuroscience

I spent the Christmas Holidays in Naples with my parents. A few days after the traditional family meetings were over, I organized a lunch with friends (and friends of friends) with backgrounds in Engineering, Computer Science and Complex Systems. Some of them are teaching in Italy and the US, others

It's biology ... stupid!

Do you ever have the feeling that you can see technology changing around you – and you see it accelerating? You see the impact on society of this or that new gadget, of a new framework or new model before others can see it and everything is just SO interesting, SO

Some links to make sense of a changing world

Once upon a time there were few outlets for information. The world was explained to us by a handful of journalists who mostly got the inspiration from each other (shall we say copy?). We had a limited menu of views of the world, a leftist, a liberal and a right-wing.

How technology is changing education

The debate about how technology is changing education is gaining strength. I just spent a few weeks in NYC and now I am back to Milan. NYC was a part-time vacation, let's call it this way. It was mostly about education, so I had some discussions about it too. Education,

The consequences of globalization foreseen 16 years ago

Back in 1994, Sir James Goldsmith had a clear vision of the implications of globalization on advanced economies. Now, 16 years later, his predictions have been confirmed: the middle class in the advanced economies has seen a constant lowering of its living standards, and without change in direction, it will

Stupid in America. Is this the reason why kids are dropping out of school?

One of the reasons dropout is high could be the low quality of education one gets at school. To get an idea of how low the quality can be, just watch this documentary from ABC: To be fair, the quality of education could be a reason why one is tempted

It's a culture. Call it the algorithmic culture.

To understand it, you need to be part of it ... 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

E tu, Apple? Patents as nuclear weapons.

E tu, Apple? Apple has finally decided to use patents to slow down the competition, represented by Android in the current form. The interesting spin to the news is that Apple is not suing Google, which develops Android, but is suing HTC, a handset manufacturer and one of the main

Patent for what?

It seems that this Facebook patent covers what we were already doing in 2001/02. I did not have time to go through the details, except reading the Slashdot story, but this patent, the way it is described in the abstract, covers what Splinder (the largest Italian blogging and community

Data driven interface

A different take to data organization: let data organize itself (as much as you can). I have been exploring this concept for a while now. Again, this is the right direction, and, as you can see from the video, the most interesting application of the concept is the innovative text

Maximizers vs. satisficers

This article about the search for better quality of life out of the Bay Area reminded me of the reason why I tend to move around looking for new places. According to the article, the need for better quality should be balanced against what one really loses leaving a big

Exponential times, Net/Web and innovation

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

Decentralized power generation

I have been thinking about this for years and now it seems that the technology and the business model are ready for prime time. Not that I wanted to start a company out of it, because the business is too much capital intensive for how I like to work. The

Video interview at Stanford

I was interviewed while attending the conference: How and Why of Promoting Entrepreneurship Abroad. The conference was sponsored by the Hoover Institution and the Kauffman Foundation. Richard Boly organized the event at Stanford. The interview is about Italy.

Dolomite Mountains, Trento, Italy

I am attending the First Workshop on Scientific Knowledge Creation, Dissemination and Evaluation. The discussion is about the evolution of the scientific paper in the 21st century. There is a pretty diverse group of people attending, from accademia (computer scientists, philosophers, etc), from the industry (mainly scientific publishers), from the

Books smell good but will not last very long

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

Winchester, England

I am in Winchester, the AlifeXI conference starts tomorrow. An (indoor!) BBQ will take place in a few minutes. It's raining and I am looking forward to see how an indoor BBQ works ;-) that's England! When I left this morning Milan was hot and mosquitoes would not let me

An article I would have written with a different title and "so what"

Today I finally had time to comment on this article, which three different people mentioned to me. The article is about how the way we think is being changed by new technology, the Internet and the Web. To make the point, there are a lot of good examples of how