In Collision detection Clive Thompson comments on a new study published in The Journal of Human Movement Science (Dec 2007), which suggests that when you can see other workers performing different tasks out the corner of your eye, it slows you down.

Dominic M. Thomas at Emory University suggests five key triggers which can be used to intervene with a virtual team which is heading for a problem before it is too late to do anything to fix it.

The Tipu Ake Lifecycle is based on the analogy of a tree growing in a forest and subject to "pests" which try to constrain it, "birds" which plant the seeds for long term future for the species and "poisons" which inhibit the process of germination.

By studying swarming behaviour in ants, locusts and crickets there is much we can learn about robot communications, how cancer tumours spread and even how our neurons swarm to produce thoughts.

The National Science Foundation, October 24, 2007, reports that scientists have found that being social and forming groups is a powerful protection against prey extinction.

MoreIntelligentLife report on James McLurkin’s, a PhD student at MIT Computer Science and AI Lab, talk at the Idea Festival in Louisville about distributed robotics and swarm behavior.

Once upon a time there were three teams – an Indian Team, a Chinese Team and a Hungarian Team…..Very interesting observations by Leslie Perlow of Harvard Business School on teams of software engineers in different countries.

Here is an interesting article which uses Wikipedia as an example of a collaborative multi-agent system (MAS) involving both human and non-human agents. The same approach could be used to map any collaborative system.

Online Reputation Systems are merely digital embodiments of two fundamental mechanisms which humans use to decide whether to trust each other as defined by Philosopher Bertrand Russell : trusting by Acquaintance and trusting by Description.

Cooperation is neither rational not fair but it works! In a webstream from the Royal Society Professor Martin Nowak of Harvard University explains "How cooperation evolves in biology and life?"