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Natural flocks (aligned) and swarms (non-aligned) both exhibit features of near-criticality, challenging their treatment as two ends of the same phase transition. We present a model for the aggregation of active individuals, in which their…
Collective decision-making arises from individual agents integrating their own personal observations with information obtained from social partners. In many biological systems that exhibit collective decision-making, the process by which…
In a variety of open source software projects, we document a superlinear growth of production ($R \sim c^\beta$) as a function of the number of active developers $c$, with $\beta \simeq 4/3$ with large dispersions. For a typical project in…
Collective behaviours often need to be expressed through numerical features, e.g., for classification or imitation learning. This problem is often addressed by proposing an ad-hoc feature set for a particular swarm behaviour context,…
Self-organization is frequently observed in active collectives, from ant rafts to molecular motor assemblies. General principles describing self-organization away from equilibrium have been challenging to identify. We offer a unifying…
The emerging collective motions of swarms of interacting agents are a subject of great interest in application areas ranging from biology to physics and robotics. In this paper, we conduct a careful analysis of the collective dynamics of a…
Colonies of ants can collectively choose the best of several nests, even when many of the active ants who organize the move visit only one site. Understanding such a behavior can help us design efficient distributed decision making…
Real-world deployments of human--swarm teams depend on balancing operator workload to leverage human strengths without inducing overload. A key challenge is that swarm size is often dynamic: robots may join or leave the mission due to…
A central challenge in the study of complex systems is the quantification of emergence -- understood as the ability of the system to exhibit collective behaviours that cannot be traced down to the individual components. While recent work…
A group of non-cooperating agents can succumb to the \emph{tragedy-of-the-commons} if all of them seek to maximize the same resource channel to improve their viability. In nature, however, groups often avoid such collapses by…
Human-swarm interaction has recently gained attention due to its plethora of new applications in disaster relief, surveillance, rescue, and exploration. However, if the task difficulty increases, the performance of the human operator…
We study community recovery in the planted partition model in regimes where the number and sizes of communities may vary arbitrarily with the number of vertices. In such highly unbalanced settings, standard accuracy or overlap-based metrics…
Evolving one-dimensional cellular automata (CAs) with genetic algorithms has provided insight into how improved performance on a task requiring global coordination emerges when only local interactions are possible. Two approaches that can…
As robots are increasingly deployed to collaborate on tasks within shared workspaces and resources, the failure of an individual robot can critically affect the group's performance. This issue is particularly challenging when robots lack…
Local interactions, when individuals meet, can regulate collective behavior. In a system without any central control, the rate of interaction may depend simply on how the individuals move around. But interactions could in turn influence…
Interesting and efficient collective behavior observed in multi-robot or swarm systems emerges from the individual behavior of the robots. The functional space of individual robot behaviors is in turn shaped or constrained by the robot's…
Inspired by organisms evolving through cooperation and competition between different populations on Earth, we study the emergence of artificial collective intelligence through massive-agent reinforcement learning. To this end, We propose a…
Accurately and efficiently crowdsourcing complex, open-ended tasks can be difficult, as crowd participants tend to favor short, repetitive "microtasks". We study the crowdsourcing of large networks where the crowd provides the network…
Numerous living systems are hierarchically organised, whereby replicating components are grouped into reproducing collectives -- e.g., organelles are grouped into cells, and cells are grouped into multicellular organisms. In such systems,…
Many organisms in nature use local interactions to generate global cooperative phenomena. To unravel how the behavior of individuals generates effective interactions within a group, we introduce a simple model, wherein each agent senses the…