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SUMMARY:The Geometry of Decision-Making in Individuals and Collectives -
  Iain Couzin (Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior)
DTSTART:20230721T090000Z
DTEND:20230721T100000Z
UID:TALK201757@talks.cam.ac.uk
DESCRIPTION:In 1905 the biologist Edmund Selous wrote of his wonderment wh
 en observing a flock of starlings flying overhead &ldquo\;they circle\; no
 w dense like a polished roof\, now disseminated like the meshes of some va
 st all-heaven-sweeping net...wheeling\, rending\, darting...a madness in t
 he sky&rdquo\;. He went on to speculate &ldquo\;They must think collective
 ly\, all at the same time\, or at least in streaks or patches &mdash\; a s
 quare yard or so of an idea\, a flash out of so many brains&rdquo\;. While
  the field of neuroscience has emerged to study the computational capabili
 ties within an organism\, far less is known about how social interactions 
 connect brains together&mdash\;and thus how sensing and information proces
 sing arises in such organismal collectives. Using new experimental technol
 ogies\, including &lsquo\;holographic&rsquo\; virtual reality for freely-m
 oving animals\, bio-mimetic robotics and artificial intelligence\, I will 
 present evidence that there exist fundamental geometric principles of spat
 iotemporal computation that transcend scales of biological organization\; 
 from neural dynamics to individual decision-making\, and from individual d
 ecision-making to that at the scale of animal collectives. I will also sho
 w how this discovery may impact human-engineered systems\, such as in the 
 control of autonomous robots.&nbsp\;
LOCATION:Seminar Room 1\, Newton Institute
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