MEMS dust brings up many interesting computational questions. For instance, how do you construct a global view of a situation using many small pieces of information that are collected in different places at different times?

How do you coordinate large numbers of unreliable parts? Some significant number of these dandelions aren't going to be working and/or awake at any given time. The individual nodes will need to wake up, find out who their neighbors are, coordinate with one another, and take on tasks like distributed acoustic sensing and sound localization that require coordination of multiple particles.

What are the usage paradigms for systems like this? There are precious resources ranging from battery capacity to sensors that only work once and hence should only be turned on when something very important is happening. When should information be communicated back to headquarters, and using what communication paradigm?