Biomimicry

Presented to the
Cosmo Computer Group

Biomimicry is the art of solving problems by seeing what similar obstacles exist in nature ..then discovering how nature acts to overcome them. One of my favorite examples of biomimicry comes from the story of the Swiss inventor George de Mestral. He was an avid hiker who spent a lot of time removing the burrs that stuck to his clothes at the end of every hike. Curious about how this happened, he examined the burrs and found they contained tiny, hook-like spears that had a natural tendency to attach themselves to the miniature loops found in fabric. He used the same mechanism in the 1950’s when he invented Velcro.

Technical uses: In order to combat biological weapons, the Defense Industry studies the reproductive behavior of insects to see how they detect trace amounts of chemical and biological agents over long distances. In bioengineering, scientists study birds to see how they recognize the songs of their own species in order to come up with better ‘speech recognition’ systems for the disabled. Last year physicists made the first practical observation of ‘quantum teleportation’ ..a trick of nature that could make future computers incredibly small and powerful.

Computer apps: During my graduate studies I tested theories of reading comprehension. A practical application of this was to see if we could develop a ‘natural language interface’ to the computer. This was before the advent of the ‘graphical user interface’. My job was to see how people ‘store and retrieve’ information about what they read, then submit my findings to the computer science department where they programmed ‘text comprehension rules’ for the computer. We were developing a system that could answer questions by querying a computer database. In a sense, we were studying the activity of the mind in order to develop a better interface to the computer.

Concluding remarks: I believe that this type of research has applications in education, helping people with reading disabilities, as well as in the computer industry, helping designers build more ‘intelligent’ search engines.