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Sprawling locomotion in vertebrates, particularly salamanders, demonstrates how body undulation and spinal mobility enhance stability, maneuverability, and adaptability across complex terrains. While prior work has separately explored…
Larval zebrafish exhibit a variety of complex undulatory swimming patterns. This repertoire is controlled by the 300 neurons projecting from brain into spinal cord. Understanding how descending control signals shape the output of spinal…
The mammalian brain is a densely interconnected network that consists of millions to billions of neurons. Decoding how information is represented and processed by this neural circuitry requires the ability to capture and manipulate the…
Many animals meander in environments and avoid collisions. How the underlying neuronal machinery can yield robust behaviour in a variety of environments remains unclear. In the fly brain, motion-sensitive neurons indicate the presence of…
Robotic navigation has historically struggled to reconcile reactive, sensor-based control with the decisive capabilities of model-based planners. This duality becomes critical when the absence of a predominant option among goals leads to…
This paper is concerned with mathematical modeling of intelligent systems, such as human crowds and animal groups. In particular, the focus is on the emergence of different self-organized patterns from non-locality and anisotropy of the…
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…
Finding general principles underlying brain function has been appealing to scientists. Indeed, in some branches of science like physics and chemistry (and to some degree biology) a general theory often can capture the essence of a wide…
Mammals can generate autonomous behaviors in various complex environments through the coordination and interaction of activities at different levels of their central nervous system. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical learning…
In general, the behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary components can not be understood nor extrapolated from the properties of a few components. The brain is a good example of this type of networked systems where some…
Accurately tracking neuronal activity in behaving animals presents significant challenges due to complex motions and background noise. The lack of annotated datasets limits the evaluation and improvement of such tracking algorithms. To…
There is renewed interest in modeling and understanding the nervous system of the nematode $\textit{Caenorhabditis elegans}$ ($\textit{C. elegans}$), as this small model system provides a path to bridge the gap between nervous system…
Stylized models of the neurodynamics that underpin sensory motor control in animals are proposed and studied. The voluntary motions of animals are typically initiated by high level intentions created in the primary cortex through a…
Spatially-embedded complex networks, such as nervous systems, the Internet and transportation networks, generally have non-trivial topological patterns of connections combined with nearly minimal wiring costs. However the growth rules…
A fundamental goal in neuroscience is to understand the relationship between neural activity and behavior. For example, the ability to extract behavioral intentions from neural data, or neural decoding, is critical for developing effective…
Many organisms leverage an interplay between shape and activity to generate motion and adapt to their environment. Embedding such feedback into synthetic microrobots could eliminate the need for sensors, software, and actuators, yet current…
This work concerns a many-body deterministic model that displays life-like properties as emergence, complexity, self-organization, spontaneous compartmentalization, and self-regulation. The model portraits the dynamics of an ensemble of…
Active particle systems of interacting self-propelled particles offer a versatile framework for modeling complex systems. When employed to describe aspects of animal behavior, the complexity of animal movement and decision-making often…
We propose a new model of the oculomotor system, particularly the vestibulo-ocular reflex, gaze fixation, and smooth pursuit. Our key insight is to exploit recent developments on adaptive internal models. The outcome is a simple model that…
Life evolved organisms to adapt dynamically to their environment and autonomously exhibit behaviours. While complex behaviours in organisms are typically associated with the capability of neurons to process information, the unicellular…