Related papers: Cell behavior in the face of uncertainty
Biological and living organisms sense and process information from their surroundings, typically having access only to a subset of external observables for a limited amount of time. In this work, we uncover how biological systems can…
Decision-making individuals are typically either an imitator, who mimics the action of the most successful individual(s), a conformist (or coordinating individual), who chooses an action if enough others have done so, or a nonconformist (or…
We study how fads emerge under social learning in a changing environment. We consider a simple sequential social learning model where rational agents arrive in order, each acting only once, and the underlying unknown state constantly…
Bacterial chemotaxis systems are as diverse as the environments that bacteria inhabit, but how much environmental variation can cells tolerate with a single system? Diversification of a single chemotaxis system could serve as an…
Biological systems, from cells to organisms, must respond to the ever changing environment in order to survive and function. This is not a simple task given the often random nature of the signals they receive, as well as the intrinsically…
The cooperative dynamics of cellular populations emerging from the underlying interactions determines cellular functions, and thereby their identity in tissues. Global deviations from this dynamics on the other hand reflects pathological…
It has not been known whether preferential dispersal is adaptive in fluctuating environments. We investigate the effect of preferential and random dispersals in bet-hedging systems by using a discrete stochastic metapopulation model, where…
Cells adapt to different conditions by altering a vast number of components, which is measurable using transcriptome analysis. Given that a cell undergoing steady growth is constrained to sustain each of its internal components, the…
Global change is reshaping ecosystems and societies. Strategic choices that were best yesterday may be sub-optimal tomorrow; and environmental conditions that were once taken for granted may soon cease to exist. In this setting, how people…
How should dispersal strategies be chosen to increase the likelihood of survival of a species? We obtain the answer for the spatially extended versions of three well-known models of two competing species with unequal diffusivities. Though…
Herding, where investors imitate others' decisions rather than relying on their own analysis, is a prevalent phenomenon in financial markets. Excessive herding distorts rational decisions, amplifies volatility, and can be exploited by…
How do organisms recognize their environment by acquiring knowledge about the world, and what actions do they take based on this knowledge? This article examines hypotheses about organisms' adaptation to the environment from machine…
The aim of my Ph.D. thesis concerns Reasoning in Highly Reactive Environments. As reasoning in highly reactive environments, we identify the setting in which a knowledge-based agent, with given goals, is deployed in an environment subject…
Bird migration is an adaptive behavior ultimately aiming at optimizing survival and reproductive success. We propose an optimal switching model to study bird migration, where birds' migration behaviors can be efficiently modeled as…
Institutions and cultures evolve adaptively in response to the current environmental incentives, usually. But sometimes institutional change is due to stochastic drives beyond current fitness, including drift, path dependency, blind…
Organisms have evolved a variety of mechanisms to cope with the unpredictability of environmental conditions, and yet mainstream models of metabolic regulation are typically based on strict optimality principles that do not account for…
Agents interacting with an incompletely known world need to be able to reason about the effects of their actions, and to gain further information about that world they need to use sensors of some sort. Unfortunately, both the effects of…
Evolutionary game theory has been successfully used to investigate the dynamics of systems, in which many entities have competitive interactions. From a physics point of view, it is interesting to study conditions under which a coordination…
Hedge has been proposed as an adaptive scheme, which guides an agent's decision in resource selection and distribution problems that can be modeled as a multi-armed bandit full information game. Such problems are encountered in the areas of…
Ecosystems, which are intricate amalgams of biological communities and their surrounding environments, continually evolve under the influence of their myriad interactions. The world is currently facing intensifying environmental…