Speech 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.

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.

My experience with biomimicry began while I was testing theories of reading comprehension in graduate school. A practical result of this study 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 from reading material. I submitted my findings to the computer science department so they could program ‘text comprehension rules’ for the computer. We were developing a system that could answer questions by retrieving information stored on a computer database. In a sense, we were studying the activity of the mind in order to develop a better interface to the computer.

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