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Dr. Eamonn Keogh's lab is hosting a contest to create a similarity measure for insect flight sounds (you may think of this as an insect classification contest, there is anecdotal evidence that music similarity algorithms may work [a]).
The details of the contest are at
www.cs.ucr.edu/~eamonn/CE/contest.htm
The task is inspired by two socially noble problems. If we could correctly identified insects using cheap sensors, we could:
1) Plan malaria interventions more effectively, perhaps saving some of the million human lives lost each year.
2) Plan insect pest crop interventions more effectively, thus growing more food with less pollution, less energy, less environmental damage etc.
This first phase of the contest runs until Nov 16 2012. We tentatively plan to have a second phase starting in spring 2013.
Please feel free to forward this posting to anyone you think might be interested. The following keywords may spark a memory: sound processing, signal processing, music processing, machine learning, data mining, classification, biometrics, entomology,
[a] In brief, my former student, Chotirat Ratanamahatana, a champion piano player with perfect pitch, was able to solve similar problems by ear.