Related papers: Cell behavior in the face of uncertainty
We consider a model for a population in a heterogeneous environment, with logistic type local population dynamics, under the assumption that individuals can switch between two different nonzero rates of diffusion. Such switching behavior…
Quantifying uncertainties in collective human behavior and decision making is crucial for ensuring public health and safety, enabling effective disaster response, informing the design of transportation and communication networks, and…
Experimentalists have observed phenotypic variability in isogenic bacteria populations. We explore the hypothesis that in fluctuating environments this variability is tuned to maximize a bacterium's expected log growth rate, potentially…
To survive in dynamic and uncertain environments, individuals must develop effective decision strategies that balance information gathering and decision commitment. Models of such strategies often prioritize either optimizing tangible…
Decision-makers abhor uncertainty, and it is certainly true that the less there is of it the better. However, recognizing that uncertainty is part of the equation, particularly for deciding on environmental policy, is a prerequisite for…
Individual choices are either based on personal experience or on information provided by peers. The latter case, causes individuals to conform to the majority in their neighborhood. Such herding behavior may be very efficient in aggregating…
Interactions among individuals in natural populations often occur in a dynamically changing environment. Understanding the role of environmental variation in population dynamics has long been a central topic in theoretical ecology and…
A perfectly rational decision-maker chooses the best action with the highest utility gain from a set of possible actions. The optimality principles that describe such decision processes do not take into account the computational costs of…
A robot operating in isolation needs to reason over the uncertainty in its model of the world and adapt its own actions to account for this uncertainty. Similarly, a robot interacting with people needs to reason over its uncertainty over…
General criterion for best efficiency of the interaction of a complex system with an ever-changing environment is derived. Its exclusive property, set by boundedness, is that the highly non-trivial interplay between parameters that…
As artificial agents become increasingly capable, what internal structure is *necessary* for an agent to act competently under uncertainty? Classical results show that optimal control can be *implemented* using belief states or world…
Learning and adaptation play great role in emergent socio-economic phenomena. Complex dynamics has been previously found in the systems of multiple learning agents interacting via a simple game. Meanwhile, the single agent adaptation is…
The dynamical evolution of many economic, sociological, biological and physical systems tends to be dominated by a relatively small number of unexpected, large changes (`extreme events'). We study the large, internal changes produced in a…
Self-adaptive systems continuously adapt to changes in their execution environment. Capturing all possible changes to define suitable behaviour beforehand is unfeasible, or even impossible in the case of unknown changes, hence human…
A cognitive radio system has the ability to observe and learn from the environment, adapt to the environmental conditions, and use the radio spectrum more efficiently. However, due to multipath fading, shadowing, or varying channel…
Models of adaptive bet-hedging commonly adopt insights from Kelly's famous work on optimal gambling strategies and the financial value of information. In particular, such models seek evolutionary solutions that maximize long term average…
Heterogeneous systems of active matter exhibit a range of complex emergent dynamical patterns. In particular, it is difficult to predict the properties of the mixed system based on its constituents. These considerations are particularly…
We examine settings in which agents choose behaviors and care about their neighbors' behaviors, but have incomplete information about the network in which they are embedded. We develop a model in which agents use local knowledge of their…
Unambiguous identification of the rewards driving behaviours of entities operating in complex open-ended real-world environments is difficult, partly because goals and associated behaviours emerge endogenously and are dynamically updated as…
We study strategic interactions between firms with heterogeneous beliefs about future climate impacts. To that end, we propose a Cournot-type equilibrium model where firms choose mitigation efforts and production quantities such as to…