Ravi Pandya

http://www.amazon.com/Search-Memory-Emergence-Science-Mind/dp/0393329372
This is an engaging and inspiring scientific autobiography. Kandel chose a deep and complex problem to study, the physical basis of memory formation, linked in the book to his vivid childhood memories of Nazi-occupied Vienna. He then spent decades studying it in the simplest possible organism, a sea slug, and eventually teased out various ways in which memory formation results in physiological changes in nerve cells and connections. Interestingly, one of them has to do with prions that act as a bistable latch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbTf2nE3Lbw
Fascinating - I listened to this while I was unpacking my office yesterday. Applying machine learning to fMRI images and web word proximity data, they were able to distinguish which of two words a person was listening to - without having trained on either the words or the person's fMRI data. Tom Mitchell has a number of other interesting papers on his website:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom/

Packed my office today, moving to the other side of the tracks...
Starting Monday, I'l be working for Jim Larus on Cloud Computing Futures. If the datacenter is the computer, what should the programming environment look like?

In short, the FFLs [feed-forward loops] in the B. Subtilis sporulation network and in sensory networks seem to be linked in ways that allow easy interpretation based on the dynamics of each FFL in isolation. This appears to be the case also for network motifs in many other developmental networks.
Such understandability of circuit patterns in terms of simpler subcircuits could not have evolved to make life easier for biologists. Understandability is a central feature of engineering, because engineers build complex systems out of simple subsystems that are well understood. These subsystems are connected so that each subsystem retains its behavior and works reliably. It is an interesting question whether understandability might be a common feature of networks that evolve to function.

This is a great book. He has the constructive design-oriented approach of an engineer, rather than the descriptive approach of a biologist, and this makes all the difference. He clearly explains successively more complex models of biological systems, starting with simple feed-forward loops and working up to temporal programs and multi-layer perceptrons. He nicely ties together the biochemistry, evolutionary processes, network theory, and control theory underlying how they work and why they are the way they are. (Hat tip: Steve Jurvetson.)

Her-2: The Making of Herceptin, a Revolutionary Treatment for Breast Cancer, by Robert Bazell. Interesting stories behind the scenes. For example, not only did they have to convince the FDA to allow smaller clinical trials with admission based the Her-2/Neu diagnostic test, but they also had to rework the study to attract enough patients - no one wants to get a placebo when her life is at stake.

The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Healthcare, by Clayton Christensen, Jerome Grossman, and Jason Hwang. He paints a great picture of what a more effective and efficient health-care system would look like, after disaggregating the current general hospital/GP system according to distinct business models & processes: focused solution shops for complex diagnoses (e.g. cancer), efficient value-added process clinics for specific well-established procedures (e.g. bypass surgery), and collaborative patient networks for managing chronic conditions (e.g. diabetes). The big question is how to get there from here. Given regulatory capture by incumbents, and people's emotional responses and cognitive biases about health care, change will not come easily. And more government control over health care will make it even harder.

I happened across this 1993 piece by Nathan Myhrvold:
Road Kill on the Information Highway
He gets many things right, though he notably misses the entire social dimension of the web. The last section is particularly interesting:

Personal Computers

I've saved the best for last. Our own industry is also doomed, and will be one of the more significant carcasses by the side of the information highway. The basic tasks that PCs are used for today will continue for a long as it makes sense to predict, so it isn't a question of the category disappearing. The question is one of who will continue to satisfy these needs and how?

.... The technical needs of computers on the information highway, or IHCs [i.e. netbooks - Ravi] are quite different than for PCs. .... Most IHCs will certainly need to be cheaper than PCs by an order of magnitude and this will inevitably cause them to be less capable in many ways, but some of their requirements are far more advanced.

Another way to say this is that the rich environment of software for PCs is largely irrelevant for IHCs. Windows, NT, System 7 and Cairo do not solve the really important technical problems required for IHC applications, and it is equally likely that the early generations of IHC software won't be great platforms for PC style apps. ...

PCs will remain paramount within their domain for many years (we'll still have a computer on every desk) but IHCs will start to penetrate a larger and larger customer base on the strength of its new and unique applications. The power of having the worlds information - and people - on line at any time is too compelling to resist. ... One day however people will realize that their little IHCs are more powerful and cheaper than PCs - just as we have finally done with mainframes. There will be a challenge for the IHC software folks to write the new systems and applications software necessary to obviate PCs, just as we had to work pretty hard to come up with NT, but this battle will clearly go to the companies who own the software standards on IHCs. The PC world won't have any more say about how this is done than the companies who created MVS or VMS did about our world. Of course, some of the VMS people were involved, but as discussed above it is very hard for organizations to make the transition.

This may sound like a rather dire prediction, but I think that for the most part it is inevitable. The challenge for Microsoft is to be sufficiently involved with the software for the IHC world that we can be a strong player in that market. If we do this then we will be able to exploit a certain degree of synergy between IHCs and PCs - there are some natural areas where there is benefit in having the two in sync. The point made above is that those benefits are not sufficiently strong that they alone will give us a position in the new world. We'll live or die on the strength of the technology and role that we carve out for ourselves in the brave new world of the information highway.

Supple: automatically generating user interfaces, by Krzysztof Gajos and Dan Weld
This shows a promising approach to something that is going to become increasingly important as people start using different kinds of devices to access their applications - phones, TVs, PCs, dedicated devices, etc. They treat interface construction as an optimization problem. Given a set of tasks and associated model elements, along with a set of available user interface elements, Supple will generate a user interface. It takes into account effort metrics for the different elements and transitions so that it can generate different widget selections for phones, touch screens, and WIMP interfaces. Furthermore, it can include statistical information from user activity traces to optimize the interface for more frequent tasks. They actually did comparative studies with human designers (students who had taken an HCI course), and Supple did about as well. Supple isn't going to run the Excel or Photoshop UI anytime soon, but it's not far from being useful for line-of-business applications and third-tier websites, most of which have atrocious usability. If Microsoft IT started using this I'd applaud - right now, I cringe every time I fill out an expense report or renew my parking permit. (On further thought, maybe it's not so far from being useful for Office - I bet the new Office UI redesign produced much of the task analysis that Supple would need...)