IST Lunch Bunch

Distributed biological systems, ranging from the molecular to the cellular to the organism levels, must solve information processing problems that are often similar to problems faced by computational and human engineered systems. Studying the strategies biological systems use to solve these problems can lead to both new bio-inspired algorithms and new testable hypotheses about systems-level behavior. In this talk, I will describe a joint computational-experimental approach to explore how neural networks in the brain form during development. I will discuss how the brain uses a very uncommon strategy to build networks and how this idea may be used to enhance the design and function of distributed wireless networks.