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All cognitive agents are composite beings. Specifically, complex living agents consist of cells, which are themselves competent sub-agents navigating physiological and metabolic spaces. Behavior science, evolutionary developmental biology,…

Network flow is a powerful mathematical framework to systematically explore the relationship between structure and function in biological, social, and technological networks. We introduce a new pipelining model of flow through networks…

The local optima network model has proved useful in the past in connection with combinatorial optimization problems. Here we examine its extension to the real continuous function domain. Through a sampling process, the model builds a…

Vascular and non-vascular cells often form an interconnected network in vitro, similar to the early vascular bed of warm blooded embryos. Our time-lapse recordings show that the network forms by extending sprouts, i.e., multicellular linear…

Mitochondrial networks exhibit a variety of complex behaviors, including coordinated cell-wide oscillations of energy states as well as a phase transition (depolarization) in response to oxidative stress. Since functional and structural…

Diverse biological networks exhibit universal features distinguished from those of random networks, calling much attention to their origins and implications. Here we propose a minimal evolution model of Boolean regulatory networks, which…

The remarkable range of biological forms in and around us, such as the undulating shape of a leaf or flower in the garden, the coils in our gut, or the folds in our brain, raise a number of questions at the interface of biology, physics and…

Machine learning tasks are generally formulated as optimization problems, where one searches for an optimal function within a certain functional space. In practice, parameterized functional spaces are considered, in order to be able to…

A fundamental question regarding biological transport networks is the interplay between the network development or reorganization and the flows it carries. We use Physarum polycephalum, a true slime mould with a transport network which…

Intracellular transport is vital for the proper functioning and survival of a cell. Cargo (proteins, vesicles, organelles, etc.) is transferred from its place of creation to its target locations via molecular motor assisted transport along…

Large-scale white matter pathways crisscrossing the cortex create a complex pattern of connectivity that underlies human cognitive function. Generative mechanisms for this architecture have been difficult to identify in part because little…

Nowadays, multiscale modelling is recognized as the most suitable way to study biological processes. Indeed, almost every phenomenon in nature exhibits a multiscale behaviour, i.e., it is the outcome of interactions that occur at different…

Localized deformation patterns are a common motif in morphogenesis and are increasingly finding widespread applications in materials science, for instance as memory devices. Here we describe the emergence of spatially localized deformations…

As a result of a hundred million years of evolution, living animals have adapted extremely well to their ecological niche. Such adaptation implies species-specific interactions with their immediate environment by processing sensory cues and…

In multicellular organisms, relations among parts and between parts and the whole are contextual and interdependent. These organisms and their cells are ontogenetically linked: an organism starts as a cell that divides producing…

Network densification and heterogenisation through the deployment of small cellular access points (picocells and femtocells) are seen as key mechanisms in handling the exponential increase in cellular data traffic. Modelling such networks…

We present MorphNet, an approach to automate the design of neural network structures. MorphNet iteratively shrinks and expands a network, shrinking via a resource-weighted sparsifying regularizer on activations and expanding via a uniform…

Robust and efficient design of networks on a realistic geographical space is one of the important issues for the realization of dependable communication systems. In this paper, based on a percolation theory and a geometric graph property,…

Many complex systems can be described in terms of networks of interacting units. Recent studies have shown that a wide class of both natural and artificial nets display a surprisingly widespread feature: the presence of highly heterogeneous…

Structural hierarchy, in which materials possess distinct features on multiple length scales, is ubiquitous in nature; diverse biological materials, such as bone, cellulose, and muscle, have as many as ten hierarchical levels. Structural…