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The complex interactions underlying collective motion in biological systems give rise to emergent behaviours such as flocking, sorting, and cooperative transport. These dynamics often involve species with different motilities coordinating…

The far-reaching consequences of ecological interactions in the dynamics of biological communities remain an intriguing subject. For decades, competition has been a cornerstone in ecological processes, but mounting evidence shows that…

Social mobilization often fails not for a lack of collective interest, but because of fierce competition between rival movements for the same limited pool of participants. We generalize the classic threshold model of collective behavior to…

Whether or not to change strategy depends not only on the personal success of each individual, but also on the success of others. Using this as motivation, we study the evolution of cooperation in games that describe social dilemmas, where…

We derive a class of macroscopic differential equations that describe collective adaptation, starting from a discrete-time stochastic microscopic model. The behavior of each agent is a dynamic balance between adaptation that locally…

There has recently been an explosion of interest in how "higher-order" structures emerge in complex systems. This "emergent" organization has been found in a variety of natural and artificial systems, although at present the field lacks a…

Humans and other animals often follow the decisions made by others because these are indicative of the quality of possible choices, resulting in `social response rules': observed relationships between the probability that an agent will make…

Organisations rely upon group formation to solve complex tasks, and groups often adapt to the demands of the task they face by changing their composition periodically. Previous research comes to ambiguous results regarding the effects of…

Recent progress in diverse intelligence has shown simple learning capacities below the organism level - single cells and even molecular networks. However, there are still many knowledge gaps around learning capacity above the organism…

Despite the obvious advantage of simple life forms capable of fast replication, different levels of cognitive complexity have been achieved by living systems in terms of their potential to cope with environmental uncertainty. Against the…

Individual computations and social interactions underlying collective behavior in groups of animals are of great ethological, behavioral, and theoretical interest. While complex individual behaviors have successfully been parsed into small…

We explain how hierarchical organization of biological systems emerges naturally during evolution, through a transition in the units of individuality. We will show how these transitions are the result of competing selective forces operating…

How does the size of a swarm affect its collective action? Despite being arguably a key parameter, no systematic and satisfactory guiding principles exist to select the number of units required for a given task and environment. Even when…

Biological agents have adopted the principle of attention to limit the rate of incoming information from the environment. One question that arises is if an artificial agent has access to only a limited view of its surroundings, how can it…

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…

The emergence of new organizational forms--such as virtual teams--has brought forward some challenges for teams. One of the most relevant challenges is coordinating the decisions of team members who work from different time zones. Intuition…

Robot swarms often exhibit emergent behaviors that are fascinating to observe; however, it is often difficult to predict what swarm behaviors can emerge under a given set of agent capabilities. We seek to efficiently leverage human input to…

We present modeling strategies that describe the motion and interaction of groups of pedestrians in obscured spaces. We start off with an approach based on balance equations in terms of measures and then we exploit the descriptive power of…

Collective decision-making is an essential capability of large-scale multi-robot systems to establish autonomy on the swarm level. A large portion of literature on collective decision-making in swarm robotics focuses on discrete decisions…

Extensive cooperation among unrelated individuals is unique to humans, who often sacrifice personal benefits for the common good and work together to achieve what they are unable to execute alone. The evolutionary success of our species is…