Self-organisationPosted by David Sumpter Thu, March 25, 2010 23:10:09 I 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!
HumansPosted by David Sumpter Mon, March 01, 2010 10:11:53 This 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 05:43:02 I 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 09:33:43 Two 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.
Micro-organismsPosted by David Sumpter Fri, January 22, 2010 13:17:57 Atsushi Tero, Toshi Nakagaki and their colleagues have published a nice new paper about slime moulds solving optimisation problems. This time they have shown how they can design transport networks just as well as, if not better than, humans.
HumansPosted by David Sumpter Thu, January 07, 2010 17:53:55 Dirk Helbing has set up a webpage for something calledVISIONEER: Envisioning a Socio Economic Knowledge Collider. The idea is to collect together ideas which can shape future research of collective behaviour of humans. He is putting together a report for the EU on this theme, hopefully resulting in long term funding for this type of research.
I thought it was quite cool to use collective distributed intelligence to find the best way to study collective intelligence.
ModellingPosted by David Sumpter Tue, December 01, 2009 19:14:06 Our research group had a seminar today by Kristiaan Pelckmans from the control systems department in Uppsala. He talked about models of how individuals communicating on various networks reach consesus. The basic model is that each individual has a starting opinion, which is expressed as a single number, and they then move their own value towards the average of their neighbours. With this model and some extensions, Kristiaan could determine how long it would take for consesus to be reached. This is the second time in a few weeks I have heard that engineers are interested in this problem. I gave a talk at the beginning of November for the Automatic Control Group at KTH in Stockholm, and met Kalle Johansson, Ather Gattami and others there who are working on similar problems.
One interesting claim from this work is that the techniques they use can be used to prove that self-propelled particle models converge to all individuals going in the same direction. It would be interesting to look at this further.
GeneralPosted by David Sumpter Sat, November 28, 2009 20:55:45 This is is a new blog about collective behaviour. It is run by me (David Sumpter), Audrey Dussutour and Iain Couzin. Its a chance for us and other researchers in the field to share news, ideas and information about research on behaviour of groups.
