AnnouncementsPosted by Audrey Dussutour Wed, May 19, 2010 14:29:20INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON STATISTICAL PHYSICS AND BIOLOGY OF COLLECTIVE MOTION
NOVEMBER 8-12 2010
DEADLINE FOR REGISTRATION : JULY 15 2010
AnnouncementsPosted by Audrey Dussutour Thu, April 29, 2010 15:45:56
I am sending you the pdf announcing XVII International Summer School “Nicolás Cabrera” 'Self-organization patterns in nature' that will be held in Madrid in September.
The organisers have some scholarships covering the
course and the stay, but not the travelling. Please, contact Gonzalo G. de Polavieja for anything you need : gonzalo.depolavieja@gmail.com
Self-organisationPosted by David Sumpter Thu, March 25, 2010 23:10:09I have spent this week meeting in Pearl Beach outside Sydney with the other members of our 'Dynamic Problem Solving' in biological systems team. This is a collaboration between the research labs of Madeleine Beekman, Toshi Nakagaki, Martin Middendorf and myself. The very clever postdocs and PhD students on the project have been looking at how different organisms solve allocation problems, with an aim to developing computer algorithms. It has been a fun project and this week many of the exciting results from the project have been written up. Most excitingly, we will soon(ish) reveal to the world what 'collective' organism is the best dynamic problem solver!
Self-organisationPosted by Audrey Dussutour Sat, March 20, 2010 14:36:52Negative feedback play an important, though often
underappreciated, role in self-organizing behaviors within
superorganisms! This is why this paper is really interesting :
JC Nieh 2010 "Negative Feedback Signal That Is Triggered by Peril Curbs Honey Bee
Recruitment " Current Biology 20:310-315
HumansPosted by David Sumpter Mon, March 01, 2010 10:11:53This week's
Economist has an interesting series of articles on the data explosion we have experienced the last few years. Quite alot of this explosion is related to human collective behaviour. As Mehdi pointed out in an earlier post, Google is leading the way here. But there are lots of other sources it seems that big businesses are very interesting in spotting patterns in collective behaviour.
Its funny reading an article like this because first I got the impression that there was lots we can learn from these companies. But later on I came to the conclusions that they just get massive datasets load them in to R and look for correlations between things. Some of the correlations they were apparently surprised by were pretty obvious really, e.g. people mass buy easy to cook food before a hurricane is going to strike. I'm not sure I can do better than this, but it seems the idea of dynamically modelling lies a long way off.
AnimalsPosted by David Sumpter Fri, February 26, 2010 05:43:02I am a bit late reading this, but I have just read
Edwards and Pratts paper on rational decision-making by Temnothorax ants. It seems to be a bit of a fashion just now to test whether groups are rational or not. The standard technique is to first give a studied organism a choice between two options A and B and establish their preference for these two options. After this a choice between A, B and a decoy C is given, the decoy being of lower quality than A or B and thus irrelevant to the rational decision-maker. It seems the individual animals and humans do change their frequency of choosing A and B dependent on the attributes of C, exhibiting irrationality. Stephen Pratt's house-hunting ants were however rational, exhibiting the same preference pattern when choosing between two nest sites in the presence and absence of decoys.
There is a suggestion that groups can be more rational than individuals because they maintain some level of independence. When moving to a new home, most of the ants do not see all of the options and are thus less likely to be influenced by decoy alternatives. The very reason that individuals are making irrational decisions is that they have access to too much information.
AnnouncementsPosted by David Sumpter Tue, February 02, 2010 09:33:43Two postdoctoral positions are available in the Collective Behaviour
Group, at the Centre for Statistical Mechanics and Complexity - CNR
Rome. The positions are funded by the IIT project ART-SWARM, focusing
on the experimental and theoretical study of collective behaviour in
bird flocks and insect swarms, and its potential applications to
artificial systems.
The candidates will work under the supervision of Irene Giardina and
Andrea Cavagna. Information on our collective behaviour research can
be found
here.
AnnouncementsPosted by Audrey Dussutour Wed, January 27, 2010 14:54:09Special Issue on Collective decision in biological swarms
Swarm Intelligence
http://www.springer.com/11721
This special issue calls for papers focusing on different aspects and issues of collective decision in animal groups, exploring the problem in different animal models and focusing on different aspects of decision: what is the pooling function? by what mechanisms can informed individuals lead the group? what compromise is found in the trade-off for speed and accuracy? In summary, how do individuals within a group integrate information in order to reach consensus? and when does the group better split than reach a consensus?
