Related papers: A question of scale
Interacting individuals in complex systems often give rise to coherent motion exhibiting coordinated global structures. Such phenomena are ubiquitously observed in nature, from cell migration, bacterial swarms, animal and insect groups, and…
Granular materials are ubiquitous in our daily lives. While they have been a subject of intensive engineering research for centuries, in the last decade granular matter attracted significant attention of physicists. Yet despite a major…
Collective sensing is an emergent phenomenon which enables individuals to estimate a hidden property of the environment through the observation of social interactions. Previous work on collective sensing shows that gregarious individuals…
Collective motion of bird flocks can be explained via the hypothesis of many wrongs, and/or, a structured leadership mechanism. In pigeons, previous studies have shown that there is a well-defined hierarchical structure and certain specific…
Group behavior has received much attention as a test case of self-organization. There has been much written in recent years to investigate interactions within groups of agents. These agents can be animals moving in an interactive way, such…
We investigate the collective dynamics of self-propelled particles able to probe and anticipate the orientation of their neighbors. We show that a simple anticipation strategy hinders the emergence of homogeneous flocking patterns. Yet,…
The massive amounts of data that social media generates has facilitated the study of online human behavior on a scale unimaginable a few years ago. At the same time, the much discussed apparent randomness with which people interact online…
Social media are transforming global communication and coordination. The data derived from social media can reveal patterns of human behavior at all levels and scales of society. Using geolocated Twitter data, we have quantified 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…
We investigate the effect of cooperative interactions in an ensemble of microorganisms, modelled as self-propelled disk-like and rod-like particles, in a three-dimensional turbulent flow to show flocking as an emergent phenomenon. Building…
Flocking is ubiquitous in nature and emerges due to short- or long-range alignment interactions among self-propelled agents. Two unfriendly species that antialign or even interact nonreciprocally show more complex collective phenomena,…
Social media are transforming global communication and coordination and provide unprecedented opportunities for studying socio-technical domains. Here we study global dynamical patterns of communication on Twitter across many scales.…
Large-scale data resulting from users online interactions provide the ultimate source of information to study emergent social phenomena on the Web. From individual actions of users to observable collective behaviors, different mechanisms…
Bursty dynamics is a common temporal property of various complex systems in Nature but it also characterises the dynamics of human actions and interactions. At the phenomenological level it is a feature of all systems that evolve…
Community effects on the behaviour of individuals, the community itself and other communities can be observed in a wide range of applications. This is true in scientific research, where communities of researchers have increasingly to…
Profiting from the emergence of web-scale social data sets, numerous recent studies have systematically explored human mobility patterns over large populations and large time scales. Relatively little attention, however, has been paid to…
Aggregation is a common behavior by which groups of organisms arrange into cohesive groups. Whether suspended in the air (like honey bee clusters), built on the ground (such as army ant bridges), or immersed in water (such as sludge worm…
Synergy (from the Greek word synergos), broadly defined, refers to combined or co-operative effects produced by two or more elements (parts or individuals). The definition is often associated with the holistic conviction quote that "the…
Research on synchronization of coupled oscillators has helped explain how uniform behavior emerges in populations of non-uniform systems. But explaining how uniform populations engage in sustainable non-uniform synchronization may prove to…
Although human beings have known about the phenomenon of "flocking"- that is, the coherent movement of large numbers of creatures (flocks of birds, schools of fish, herds of woolly mammoths, etc.)- since prehistoric times, it is only in the…