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

A new IBM research report suggests that the best analogies for businesses in the future may no longer be the command structures of the military but the self-organising networks found in nature: schools of fish, flocks of birds and swarms of insects.

Sunday Times Online, May 07, 2006 reports in Dolphins ‘know each other’s names’ that DOLPHINS may be even closer to humans than previously realised, with new research showing they communicate by whistling out their own “names”.