I co-led a working group at Mathematical Biosciences Institute (MBI) at the Ohio State University this week with Erol Akçay. Along with Mike Levy, we worked on a project called “Dynamic feedbacks between social structure and behaviors”.
The evolution and consequences of social behaviors depend crucially on the
social environment they are expressed in. In particular, the interaction network structure is known to profoundly affect how selection acts on behaviors. At the same time, the interaction network itself is dynamic and responds to social outcomes. In this project, we will use models of coevolving networks and social behaviors to understand the reciprocal feedbacks between social structure and behaviors. We will also attempt to use existing social network data to predict the trajectory of particular types of behaviors and how different behavioral states of the population might affect social structure going forward.
Description of workshop, from the workshop description on the MBI site:
“This CTW is a collaborative workshop for researchers and students with research interests in collective behavior and emergent phenomena in biology and its applications. The participants will be organized into interdisciplinary teams according to their interests and complementary skills. Each team will be tasked with exploring, analyzing and modeling original data sets provided by biologist attendees. The event will be similar in spirit to a hackathon in computer science, with the goal of finding new ways to understand the provided biological data. We emphasize that the workshop is meant to involve active participation with attendees working together across disciplines to solve problems in current research. In addition, regular debriefing sessions will be organized throughout the days of the workshop in order for each team to provide updates to and receive feedback from the rest of the participants on their progress.”
