Research Interests
Many organisms display self-organized collective motion, such as flocks of birds, swarms of locusts, and schools of fish. Such groups can be composed of hundreds to millions of members, with all individuals responding rapidly to their neighbors to maintain the collective motion. Animal aggregates can display a wide range of behaviors and can quickly and efficiently transition between them without loss of group coherence. These transitions could be due to changing behavioral rules, environmental factors including introduction of predators, or stochastic effects. It is of fundamental importance to understand how and why animal groups change between different collective states, as well as how individual decisions effect the group dynamics. Questions of this nature arise in the control and prediction of locust swarm outbreaks, management of over fishing, crowd and traffic control in human populations, as well as the design and control of unmanned vehicles and sensor networks. New computational techniques and mathematical theory must be developed to model and analyze the dynamics of both natural and engineered self-organizing aggregates. Currently my research is focused on:
Major Fields of Interest:
Publications
Supplementary Information: Figure 7, Appendix.