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Operational maturity of biological control systems have fuelled the inspiration for a large number of mathematical and logical models for control, automation and optimisation. The human brain represents the most sophisticated control…
Controlling multi-agent systems is a persistent challenge in organismal, robotic and social collectives, especially when agents exhibit stochastic indecisiveness -- frequently switching between conflicting behavioral rules. Here, we…
Understanding self-organization in natural collectives such as bird flocks inspires swarm robotics, yet most flocking models remain reactive, overlooking anticipatory cues that enhance coordination. Motivated by avian postural and wingbeat…
Hierarchy seems to pervade complexity in both living and artificial systems. Despite its relevance, no general theory that captures all features of hierarchy and its origins has been proposed yet. Here we present a formal approach resulting…
Background: Recent research in animal behaviour has contributed to determine how alignment, turning responses, and changes of speed mediate flocking and schooling interactions in different animal species. Here, we address specifically the…
Human travelling behaviours are markedly regular, to a large extent, predictable, and mostly driven by biological necessities (\eg sleeping, eating) and social constructs (\eg school schedules, synchronisation of labour). Not surprisingly,…
Dynamic trees are mixtures of tree structured belief networks. They solve some of the problems of fixed tree networks at the cost of making exact inference intractable. For this reason approximate methods such as sampling or mean field…
Interaction within small groups can often be represented as a sequence of events, where each event involves a sender and a recipient. Recent methods for modeling network data in continuous time model the rate at which individuals interact…
Several models of flocking have been promoted based on simulations with qualitatively naturalistic behavior. In this paper we provide the first direct application of computational modeling methods to infer flocking behavior from…
The development of multicellular organisms entails a deep connection between time-dependent biochemical processes taking place at the subcellular level, and the resulting macroscopic phenotypes that arise in populations of up to trillions…
Humans exhibit a remarkable capacity for anticipating the actions of others and planning their own actions accordingly. In this study, we strive to replicate this ability by addressing the social motion prediction problem. We introduce a…
Leadership plays a key role in social animals, including humans, decision-making and coalescence in coordinated activities such as hunting, migration, sport, diplomatic negotiation etc. In these coordinated activities, leadership is a…
The study of network structure has uncovered signatures of the organization of complex systems. However, there is also a need to understand how to control them; for example, identifying strategies to revert a diseased cell to a healthy…
Collective motion is ubiquitous in nature; groups of animals, such as fish, birds, and ungulates appear to move as a whole, exhibiting a rich behavioral repertoire that ranges from directed movement to milling to disordered swarming.…
One of the properties that make ecological systems so unique is the range of complex behavioural patterns that can be exhibited by even the simplest communities with only a few species. Much of this complexity is commonly attributed to…
Animals living in groups make movement decisions that depend, among other factors, on social interactions with other group members. Our present understanding of social rules in animal collectives is mainly based on empirical fits to…
Many simple natural phenomena are characterized by complex motion that appears random at first glance, but that often displays underlying patterns and behavior that can be clustered in groups. The movement of small pieces of paper falling…
Organisms may respond to local stimuli that benefit or threaten their fitness. The adaptive movement behaviour may allow individuals to adjust their speed to maximise the chances of being in comfort zones, where death risk is minimal. We…
We propose a general scenario to analyze social and economic changes in modern environments. We illustrate the ideas with a model that incorporating the main trends is simple enough to extract analytical results and, at the same time,…
When animal groups move coherently in the form of a flock, their trajectories are not all parallel, the individuals exchange their position in the group. In this Letter we introduce a measure of this mixing dynamics, which we quantify as…