ABOUT
Complex Systems approaches provides a natural framework to encode the complexity of a wide range of phenomena. Across the fields of biology, behavioral ecology, epidemiology, sociology, computer science, physics, etc. An increasing attention is recently devoted to studying Collective Animal Behavior. Indeed, these behaviors are the result of complex ecological, biological and social processes where different agents interact competitively or cooperatively, e.g., for foraging/hunting and mating. Contact networks, which are the substrate of infection transmissions, communication, ... are usually heterogeneous, high-dimensional and dynamics. Understanding such complexity is key to address the emergence of collective behavior emergencies, such as effective leadership, collective memory and spatial sorting, collective cognition, self-organized lane formation, traffic flow, quorum decision-making and so on. Such plethora of phenomena provides an important field of application of advanced theoretical frameworks that are recently attracting a large interest in the network science community as well as complex system society. Moreover, the advent of Big Data technologies, which allow effective acquisition, storage, and processing of petascale unstructured data, further promises to improve the effectiveness and cross-fertilization of data mining and machine learning techniques with network science and complex systems. For instance, multilayer and temporal networks can describe the multi-level structure of animal social networks. Such new theoretical concepts allow us to describe the multiple ingredients of these complex systems at different scales – from the microscopic mechanisms of agents’ interaction to the level of populations and their spatio-temporal organization. This motivates us to focus on the following area of particular importance and significant recent interest. The aim of the satellite “Collective Animal Behavior” is to gather the diverse and interdisciplinary community of scientists working on modeling multi-level and multi-agent dynamics along with its application in the field.
The meeting will be an occasion to identify open questions and new challenges in the field, shortening the path from theory to application. The meeting aims at covering the following topics (but not restricted to): Are there commonalities in animal social networks across species? Do social animal networks depend on species sociability? Classes of social networks. proximity, mating, leadership, predator-prey Roles, personality, traits and network position Social brain hypothesis is reflected in the animal social networks available? Opportunities for modeling beyond flocks Culture transmission in animal collectives |