Fruit flies have long been a favorite research subject for biologists, but now they're unlocking secrets for computer scientists as well. Specifically, researchers used insights into how a fruit fly's nervous system develops to design a new algorithm that could prove useful for wireless networking, routing, and other network protocols.

When a wireless network gets deployed, it has to be organized to get information to every node in the network efficiently. One way to do this is to assign certain nodes to be leaders responsible for their own smaller areas of the network (called the "maximal independent set"). But assigning these leaders quickly and efficiently, with a minimum of back and forth communication, has been an open problem in distributed computing for a long time.

According to a paper published in Science, current algorithms are designed to know things about how a network is set up—such as how many neighbors each node is connected to. This doesn't jibe well the flexibility that wireless networks offer.

In the fruit fly, the researchers saw the flexibility and efficiency they wanted for wireless networks expressed in nature. While the fly's nervous system is developing in the larval and pupal stages, it selects "sensory organ precursors" that play a similar role to the leader nodes in a wireless network. The fly's nervous system does this, however, without having any information about how cells are connected—or, to follow the analogy, about how the network is built.

The researchers studied this process and came up with an algorithm for distributed computing based on it. They say it runs slightly slower than current solutions, but can be applied more broadly because it can work in more difficult conditions.

Smart Rescheduler can rank possible meeting times. Credit: Google

Google has launched an experimental feature for its Calendar Web application that applies the company's considerable expertise in search to the problem of scheduling meetings. The feature, Smart Rescheduler, allows users to select a meeting that needs to be rescheduled and get suggestions about the best alternative times.

Product manager Ken Norton explains that in the calendar team's surveys of executive administrative assistants, rescheduling was typically a painful, time-consuming task. Norton says that watching administrators "horse-trade" conference rooms, flip through executive calendars, and try to predict the effects of rescheduling a single meeting led the team to believe automation must be able to help somehow.

Google's programmers decided to treat scheduling as a search problem--analogous to finding flights or shopping for products. The Smart Rescheduler takes into account factors such as time zones, available conference rooms, and people who need to attend the meeting, and provides a list of candidate times, ranked by factors such as whether a time is within working hours, whether it is accessible to all attendees, and whether it requires additional rescheduling.

If a conflicting meeting includes many of the same players as the meeting that's being rescheduled, Smart Rescheduler may include the suggestion that the conflicting event could also be rescheduled. A user can also refine the tool by marking certain people as optional or changing the planned length of the meeting. The technology used to rank meeting times is partly borrowed from Google's existing IP and partly built from scratch, Norton says. Smart Rescheduler only works if all participants in a meeting use Google Calendar and if they share availability information with each other. As a result, it's intended mainly for use within a company.

Though it's currently available only as an experimental feature in Calendar Labs, Smart Rescheduler clearly fits into Google's plan to broaden its appeal to enterprise users. In particular, Norton boasted about how the feature demonstrates the power of cloud computing for enterprise. Norton says that the processing required for the ranking algorithms would be too slow if they had to run on a user's local machine--and he didn't miss the opportunity to compare the speed of searching e-mail in Gmail to the speed (or lack thereof) when performing the same search within Outlook.

He also touted Google's ability to release a feature that business users can try just by opting in, without having to upgrade any software.

Eli Peli, a researcher at the Schepens Eye Research Institute in Boston, is developing software that can enhance the quality of a TV image for people with visual impairments such as macular degeneration--a disease that makes images on the screen seem blurred and distorted.

Peli's algorithms increase the contrast of a picture over spatial frequencies that are easier for a visually impaired person to see. In his lab a remote control can be used to adjust the contrast on a 32 inch television screen connected to a PC, creating a specially-enhanced picture.

"It's simple," Peli says, showing me CNN, the movie Shrek and a basketball game all in split-screen mode. In each clip he points out the difference in resolution, even for a person with normal eyesight. In the image on the right, details like grass, flowers and a person's facial features are much clearer than in the one on the left. Peli, who is also a professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School, expects a grant from Analog Devices in the new year. This company has been testing his software and Peli says it is eager to build it into its hardware. He explains his work and demonstrates the system in the video below.

Video by Brittany Sauser