Iain Couzin (Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior & University of Konstanz), “Collective intelligence in animals and robots”

Abstract
In 1905 the biologist Edmund Selous wrote of his wonderment when observing a flock of starlings flying overhead “they circle; now dense like a polished roof, now disseminated like the meshes of some vast all-heaven-sweeping net…wheeling, rending, darting…a madness in the sky”. He went on to speculate “They must think collectively, all at the same time, or at least in streaks or patches — a square yard or so of an idea, a flash out of so many brains”. Today, we still know relatively little about how social interactions connect brains together—and thus how sensing and information processing arises in such organismal collectives. Employing automated tracking, computational reconstruction of sensory information, biomimetic robotics, and immersive ‘holographic’ virtual reality (VR) experiments, I will explore geometric principles of collective decision-making that occur across scales of biological organization, from neural dynamics to animal collectives. In doing so I will explain why classical models from non-linear statistical physics fail to account for collective animal behavior. I will will present several new theoretical frameworks, including active inference and neural ring attractor networks, that do account for key experimental findings and challenge long-held beliefs about how order can emerge from disorder within animal collectives.

This talk will take place in person at SCIoI and on Zoom.

Photo taken by https://www.uni-konstanz.de.