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From myth to algorithm: seeing what others miss, recognising what remains hidden Some names carry centuries of meaning. Argus is one of them — and it is no accident that a documentary intelligence platform has chosen to invoke this figure from Greek mythology to define its purpose. In the Hellenic pantheon, Argus Panoptes was an extraordinary giant: he possessed a hundred eyes distributed across his entire body, and his particular gift was that they never all slept at the same time. While some rested, others remained watchful, making Argus the perfect guardian. Hera, wife of Zeus, employed him for precisely that task: to keep watch over Io, one of her husband's lovers, transformed into a cow. Argus's vigilance was so effective that Zeus had to send Hermes to free her, and only through musi...

The algorithm cannot be separated from the substrate A recent study from the Estonian Research Council puts forward something uncomfortable for those who think about artificial intelligence: that consciousness might require a kind of computation that does not separate algorithm from physical substrate. They call it "biological computationalism", and the core argument is that brains do not run programmes on hardware — they are a physical process that computes as it unfolds through time.The central idea: in real brains, there is no clean line between "the algorithm" and "the physical implementation". Discrete events (neural firing) are embedded in continuous processes (chemical gradients, voltage fields, ionic diffusion). Changing the implementation changes the computation, because the two a...

The conference on the Intelligent Destination Platform held at FITUR brought together several voices from the sector to discuss the future of Spain's tourism model. Enrique Martínez, president of SEGITTUR, was joined by Carlos Tejedor, director of Central Government Affairs at Telefónica Empresas España; Marcos Pampliega, smart territories specialist at Minsait; Inmaculada de Benito, director of the Tourism, Culture and Sport Department at CEOE; and John Mora, vice-president of the Smart Cities commission at AMETIC. Together, they arrived at a shared diagnosis: Spain's tourism problem was not a lack of capabilities, but an absence of connections between them. Disconnection is the problem: Spanish tourism in silos Spain has been a major tourism power for decades. Yet despite having comp...

It turns out that building smart cities takes more than sensors and algorithms. Who would have thought. The Spanish Smart Cities Network (RECI) Congress in Bilbao brought us back to basics, to what we know but sometimes forget: data is the foundation of everything. Without it, there is no knowledge to extract, no decisions to make. But having data is not enough: if it is not shared, if it stays locked in silos, it loses all its potential. Black-box AI is about as useful as an instruction manual written in Elvish, and a city that does not exist to improve the lives of the people who live in it perhaps does not deserve to call itself smart. Two days in which tradition and innovation proved they are not opposites, in which collaboration moved beyond rhetoric to demand method, and in which p...

Without logical reasoning and symbolic representation, the concept of agency will fail AI agents are software programmes that use artificial intelligence to interact with their environment, reason, plan, and execute tasks autonomously, with the aim of achieving specific objectives with minimal human intervention. The background noise of the endless conversation and relentless chatter about AI seems to take it for granted that this is the obvious way we are going to organise how AI behaves. Everyone is talking about it. "Agentic AI" as a concept is broader than "automated AI", but the former cannot exist without the latter. That is what we are discussing here. Traditional automation requires complete process specification: the rules, conditions, and steps the system must follow are define...

GraphRAG saves the kidney and the life: it is not another format, it is a symbolic navigation plan capable of reasoning in real time The market presents RAG and GraphRAG as the same thing in a different format — but GraphRAG is not another format. It is a symbolic navigation plan capable of reasoning in real time. The RAG and GraphRAG AI markets, in this LLM-centric moment we are living through, tend to treat both options as the same thing in a different format — especially since the arrival of MCP (Model Context Protocol) and the concept of tools. MCP is the open protocol that Anthropic recently launched to standardise the way LLMs connect with external systems. It is essentially an attempt to create a universal standard so that language models can interact with data sources, APIs, and ...

RTVE, the Bank of Italy, and IKEA tell us how they use them: a review of SEMANTICS 2025 At some point, most of us have been told — or at least heard — "don't let them sell you bad wine with cheese." What is the origin of that well-worn saying? The fat in cheese forms a film in the mouth that neutralises tannins — the molecules responsible for astringency. At the same time, its casein binds to those same tannins, while proteins block the aromas. For all these reasons, any rough wine consumed alongside a well-aged, fatty cheese tastes smooth. When that happened, the wine buyer paid the same price for a bad wine as for a good one. Back home, with no cheese to mask it, the deception became obvious. That is why experienced wine traders used to warn their apprentices — often their own children...

IKEA at SEMANTICS 2025: how the Swedish giant uses graphs to connect products, customers and experiences Proverbs are remarkably universal when it comes to distilling collective experience into a form of secular wisdom. These sayings and adages are passed down through generations, serving equally well to preach caution—"better safe than sorry"—or audacity—"nothing ventured, nothing gained". Consistency isn't exactly their strong suit, because life, in all its complexity, covers every base. However, most of us would agree that sometimes life leaves you no choice, as the saying goes: "you don't get something for nothing". Unless, of course, you believe in miracles, snake oil, the Holy Grail, perpetual motion, the philosopher's stone, manna from heaven, El Dorado, the goose that laid the go...