Related papers: The Convergence of Bird Flocking
Cooperative interactions pervade in a broad range of many-body populations, such as ecological communities, social organizations, and economic webs. We investigate the dynamics of a population of two equivalent species A and B that are…
Natural flocks (aligned) and swarms (non-aligned) both exhibit features of near-criticality, challenging their treatment as two ends of the same phase transition. We present a model for the aggregation of active individuals, in which their…
Thermal soaring enables birds to perform cost-efficient flights during foraging or migration trips. Yet, although all soaring birds exploit vertical winds effectively, this group contains species that vary strongly in their morphologies.…
We present a simple model of protesters scattered throughout a city who want to gather into large and mobile groups. This model relies on random walkers on a street network that follow tactics built from a set of basic rules. Our goal is to…
The study of the movement of flocks, whether biological or technological is motivated by the desire to understand the capability of coherent motion of a large number of agents that only receive very limited information. In a biological…
A common problem to all applications of linear finite dynamical systems is analyzing the dynamics without enumerating every possible state transition. Of particular interest is the long term dynamical behaviour. In this paper, we study the…
We propose an architecture for fine-grained visual categorization that approaches expert human performance in the classification of bird species. Our architecture first computes an estimate of the object's pose; this is used to compute…
In recent years it has become evident the need of understanding how failure of coordination imposes constraints on the size of stable groups that highly social mammals can live in. We examine here the forces that keep animals together as a…
Fine-grained categorisation has been a challenging problem due to small inter-class variation, large intra-class variation and low number of training images. We propose a learning system which first clusters visually similar classes and…
Animals often exhibit changes in their behavior during migration. Telemetry data provide a way to observe geographic position of animals over time, but not necessarily changes in the dynamics of the movement process. Continuous-time models…
Collective animal movements produce spectacular natural phenomena that arise from simple local interactions among group members. Flocks of homing pigeons, Columba livia, provide a useful model for the study of collective motion and decision…
We study the convergence speed of distributed iterative algorithms for the consensus and averaging problems, with emphasis on the latter. We first consider the case of a fixed communication topology. We show that a simple adaptation of a…
Recent empirical observations of three-dimensional bird flocks and human crowds have challenged the long-prevailing assumption that a metric interaction distance rules swarming behaviors. In some cases, individual agents are found to be…
Experiments find coherent information transfer through biological groups on length and time scales distinctly below those on which asymptotically correct hydrodynamic theories apply. We present here a new continuum theory of collective…
Swarming is a conspicuous behavioural trait observed in bird flocks, fish shoals, insect swarms and mammal herds. It is thought to improve collective awareness and offer protection from predators. Many current models involve the hypothesis…
Heterogeneities in environmental conditions often induce corresponding heterogeneities in the distribution of species. In the extreme case of a localized patch of increased growth rates, reproducing populations can become strongly…
From bird flocks to fish schools, animal groups often seem to react to environmental perturbations as if of one mind. Most studies in collective animal behaviour have aimed to understand how a globally ordered state may emerge from simple…
This paper studies the detection of bird calls in audio segments using stacked convolutional and recurrent neural networks. Data augmentation by blocks mixing and domain adaptation using a novel method of test mixing are proposed and…
It is known that evolution strategies in continuous domains might not converge in the presence of noise. It is also known that, under mild assumptions, and using an increasing number of resamplings, one can mitigate the effect of additive…
Birds rely on active high-acceleration morphing and flapping to navigate complex airflows, but they can also maintain stable fixed-wing postures under persistent atmospheric disturbances. Here, we show that avian wings exhibit aerodynamic…