The Center for Biologically-Inspired Design at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta have announced a conference in Biologically Inspired Design in Science and Engineering on May 10-12.

Frank Lacombe of the Evolutionary and Swarm Design Group at the University of Calgary offers a good introduction to the concept of Swarm Behavior. Using examples of ants, bees, birds, fish, and termites he identifies the two main advantages of such decentralized systems: robustness and flexibility. The objective of bioteaming is to realise these same two swarm behavior advantages in organisational teams and inter-organisational business networks.

According to research by UPS Europe Business Monitor involving a survey of around 1500 business leaders from Europe’s top 15,000 companies organisations are developing more support for policies to help women attain more senior positions.

The Rocky Mountain Institute and The Biomimicry Guild have launched a new Biomimicry Database to enable knowledge sharing to support researchers and practitioners. They are looking for user feedback....

New Scientist Magazine reports that the US Department of Defense plans to develop a lie detector that can be used without the subject knowing they are being assessed. In a call for proposals on a DoD website, contractors are being given until 13 January to suggest ways to develop the Remote Personnel Assessment (RPA).

Usually we think of the importance of sharing 'positive' intelligence between organisational team members (for example Virtual Team Behavior - Curiosity and Learning). However recent UK research on foraging Pharaoh ants indicates that sharing 'negative' intelligence to avoid wasted effort may be just as important.

The theory of Biophilia, put forward by Edward Wilson, author of Journey to the Ants, suggests that human well-being and health is dependent on our relationships with the natural environment. New clinical research by Howard Frumkin of Emory University in Atlanta seems to back this up.

The 12th International Conference on Concurrent Enterprising (ICE 2006) will be held at the Palazzo delle Stelline, Milan, Italy, 26-28 June 2006. This is a major forum for practitioners, researchers and tool vendors to demonstrate and share the results of their work in the broad domain of Concurrent Enterprising, which is a combination of Concurrent Engineering and the Virtual/ Extended Enterprise. The theme of this year's conference is "Innovative Products and Services through Collaborative Networks ". For more details on the conference.

Bees recognise human faces

The pattern recognition skills of bees are well-known, thought to have evolved to enable them to discriminate between different types of flowers. As social insects, they can also recognise and differentiate between their hivemates. Now a new study shows that these capabilities are so powerful that bees can recognize human faces better than some humans and with one-ten thousandth of the brain cells. The results may help lead to better face-recognition software. To read boingboing synopsis.

Ecolead is a major European applied research project on collaborative networked organisations (CNOs)

Ecolead (European Collaborative Networked Organisations Leadership Initiative) looks like it could be one of the most important strategic research projects in the virtual collaboration area in Europe and beyond over the next 4 years.