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?"

The Christmas Truce is the true story of how British and German soldiers in the trenches on Christmas Eve 1914 called a truce and celebrated Christmas Day by singing carols, exchanging gifts and playing football together.

The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) reports in a “Meta Analysis of Virtual Teams” that virtual teams are less productive and demonstrate worse judgement that ‘face to face’ teams but there are ways to improve things.

Virtual teams must consider ‘unified communications’ when they are chosing their collaboration tools if they want to be effective according to new research by Cisco. Reported by ElectricNews.Net Sept 20, 2006