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Collective behaviour is a widespread phenomenon in biology, cutting through a huge span of scales, from cell colonies up to bird flocks and fish schools. The most prominent trait of collective behaviour is the emergence of global order:…

Functional networks provide a topological description of activity patterns in the brain, as they stem from the propagation of neural activity on the underlying anatomical or structural network of synaptic connections. This latter is well…

Swarming phenomena are ubiquitous in various physical, biological, and social systems, where simple local interactions between individual units lead to complex global patterns. A common feature of diverse swarming phenomena is that the…

Nature is in constant flux, so animals must account for changes in their environment when making decisions. How animals learn the timescale of such changes and adapt their decision strategies accordingly is not well understood. Recent…

Scale-free foraging patterns are widespread among animals. These may be the outcome of an optimal searching strategy to find scarce randomly distributed resources, but a less explored alternative is that this behaviour may result from the…

Many real-world networks are directed, sparse and hierarchical, with a mixture of feed-forward and feedback connections with respect to the hierarchy. Moreover, a small number of 'master' nodes are often able to drive the whole system. We…

Here we study the emergence of spontaneous leadership in large populations. In standard models of opinion dynamics, herding behavior is only obeyed at the local scale due to the interaction of single agents with their neighbors; while at…

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…

The ability to capture detailed interactions among individuals in a social group is foundational to our study of animal behavior and neuroscience. Recent advances in deep learning and computer vision are driving rapid progress in methods…

We apply genetic programming techniques to the `shepherding' problem, in which a group of one type of animal (sheep dogs) attempts to control the movements of a second group of animals (sheep) obeying flocking behavior. Our genetic…

Living systems are hierarchical control systems that display a small world network structure, in which many smaller clusters are nested within fewer larger ones, producing a fractal-like structure with a power-law cluster size distribution…

Animal collective behavior is often modeled with self-propelled particles, assuming each individual has ``omniscient'' knowledge of its neighbors. Yet, neighbors may be hidden from view and we do not know the effect of this information…

Enabling artificial agents to automatically learn complex, versatile and high-performing behaviors is a long-lasting challenge. This paper presents a step in this direction with hierarchical behavioral repertoires that stack several…

The brain is immensely complex, with diverse components and dynamic interactions building upon one another to orchestrate a wide range of functions and behaviors. Understanding patterns of these complex interactions and how they are…

Networks have in recent years emerged as an invaluable tool for describing and quantifying complex systems in many branches of science. Recent studies suggest that networks often exhibit hierarchical organization, where vertices divide into…

We study the collective behaviour of an ensemble of coupled motile elements whose interactions depend on time and are alternatively attractive or repulsive. The evolution of interactions is driven by individual internal variables with…

We describe a simple adaptive network of coupled chaotic maps. The network reaches a stationary state (frozen topology) for all values of the coupling parameter, although the dynamics of the maps at the nodes of the network can be…

From flocking birds to schooling fish, organisms interact to form collective dynamics across the natural world. Self-organization is present at smaller scales as well: cells interact and move during development to produce patterns in fish…

There is substantial interest in the effect of human mobility patterns on opportunistic communications. Inspired by recent work revisiting some of the early evidence for a L\'evy flight foraging strategy in animals, we analyse datasets on…

Characterizing the movement patterns of animals is crucial to improve our understanding of their behavior and thus develop adequate conservation strategies. Such investigations, which could not have been implemented in practice only a few…