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biology

Biological Braitemberg vehicles: these flies smell light!

28 May 2010 - 8:53am — ocrampal

Apparently scientists have achieved controlling the sensory input of a fly so that it responds to a specific stimulus. It reminds me of Valentino Braitemberg vehicles, except those were simple mechanical objects without any inter-neurons, yet they exhibited very complex behavior.

Evolution of evolution

3 February 2010 - 1:10am — ocrampal

Evolution is a complicated beast. It seems so easy, yet there is no formula, no theorem, just a description of a phenomenon. This does not mean that the description is wrong, it means we are just scratching the surface of something much deeper than we currently know.

This article presents an interesting spin to the subject. 

Models, super models and computation

10 April 2008 - 2:25pm — ocrampal

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.

Mathematics Is Biology's Next Microscope, Only Better; Biology Is Mathematics' Next Physics, Only Better

26 February 2008 - 11:06pm — ocrampal

While reading about Neuroscience, Biology, Bio-inspired Artificial Intelligence and Evolutionary Robotics, I was struck by the fact that it seems like in each of these fields, mathematics is stretched to the point that it is no longer useful to model system complexity. It instead gets in the way of simple and elegant explanations about emergence and models that might be able to link different levels of complexity within a system.

Reading about ...

13 February 2008 - 10:49am — ocrampal

... Bio inspired Artificial Intelligence and Bayesian Networks.

In the past few months I met researchers from Rome's CNR, Stanford and EPFL (Lausanne). They are great researchers, all involved in this Bio-Inspired quest.

I like what I am reading, I like brainstorming about it and the idea of applying these techniques to the Net/Web is stimulating ...

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.

Synthetic biology videos

22 September 2007 - 7:30pm — ocrampal

Videos from the Synthetic biology conference in Zurich are now available online.

BTW: with the internet, conferences are not what they used to be. Nowadays it is common to get videos and proceedings, so what's left of the purpose of conferences? Maybe networking and having fun is what's left ... but that again might change in the near future.

Books

30 August 2007 - 10:08pm — ocrampal

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.

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.

Back to Milan

25 June 2007 - 9:21pm — ocrampal

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

Synthetic Biology 3.0

22 June 2007 - 11:44am — ocrampal

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.

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