A Workshop in Ecology and Behaviour seminar hosted by the School of Biological Sciences
Abstract: Collective behaviour is all around us, from the mesmerizing murmurations of starling flocks in the sky to human crowds at music concerts. Understanding these systems is challenging given the complexity that arises from individuals behaving according to their own aims while interacting with each other. In this talk, I will first showcase how we combine empirical data and computational models based on self-organization to understand the individual rules that underlie collective behaviour, using bird flocks under attack by the RobotFalcon as case studies. I will then present our new framework -developed on data of fish, birds, goats, and baboons- to study variation in collective motion across species and ecological contexts: the Swarm-Verse.
Marina Papadopoulou is a postdoctoral researcher at Swansea University working on animal collective behaviour. She is a computational biologist, interested in understanding the underlying processes of self-organized social systems. She specialises in the development of biologically-relevant agent-based models for the study of collective behaviour using a data-driven approach. She is part of the SHOALgroup of Dr. Andrew King, working on the 2G Swarm project.