ANTS 2024

Prof. Iain D. Couzin

The Geometry of Decision Making

Abstract: In 1905 the biologist Edmund Selous wrote of his wonderment when observing a flock of starlings flying overhead “they circle; now dense like a polished roof, now disseminated like the meshes of some vast all-heaven-sweeping net...wheeling, rending, darting...a madness in the sky”. He went on to speculate “They must think collectively, all at the same time, or at least in streaks or patches — a square yard or so of an idea, a flash out of so many brains”. While the field of neuroscience has emerged to study the computational capabilities within an organism, far less is known about how social interactions connect brains together—and thus how sensing and information processing arises in such organismal collectives. Using new experimental technologies, including 'holographic' virtual reality for freely-moving animals, bio-mimetic robotics and artificial intelligence, I will present evidence that there exist fundamental geometric principles of spatiotemporal computation that transcend scales of biological organization; from neural dynamics to individual decision-making, and from individual decision-making to that at the scale of the collective. I will also show how this discovery may impact human-engineered systems, demonstrating that the evolved controller exhibits close-to-optimal performance in autonomous vehicle (terrestrial, airborne and watercraft) control, while requiring minimal sensing/computation and no system-specific tuning or optimization.

Bio: Iain Couzin is a founding Director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and a Professor and Speaker of the Excellence Cluster “Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour” at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Previously he was an Assistant and then full Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, and prior to that a Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, and a Junior Research Fellow in the Sciences at Balliol College, Oxford. His work aims to reveal the fundamental principles that underlie evolved collective behavior, and consequently his research includes the study of a wide range of biological systems, from neural collectives to insect swarms, fish schools and primate groups. In recognition of his research he has been recipient of the Searle Scholar Award in 2008, top 5 most cited papers of the decade in animal behavior research 1999-2010, the Mohammed Dahleh Award in 2009, Popular Science's "Brilliant 10” Award in 2010, National Geographic Emerging Explorer Award in 2012, the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London in 2013, a Web of Science Global Highly Cited Researcher 2018-2022, the Lagrange Prize in 2019, the Falling Walls Life Sciences Award and the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize (Germany's highest research honor) in 2022, and the Rothschild Distinguished Fellowship at the University of Cambridge in 2023.

Prof. Barbara Mazzolai

Harvesting Plant Intelligence for Soft Robotics

Abstract: Plants thrive in virtually all natural and human-adapted environments, making them increasingly popular models for developing robotics systems due to their strategies of morphological and behavioral adaptation. This adaptability and high plasticity offer novel approaches to designing, modeling, and controlling artificial systems in unstructured scenarios. Simultaneously, the development of artifacts based on plant working principles reveals how plants promote innovative approaches for preservation and management plans, opening new applications for engineering-driven plant science. Environmentally mediated growth patterns (e.g., tropisms) serve as clear examples of adaptive behaviors demonstrated through morphological phenotyping. Plants also establish networks with other plants through subterranean roots-fungi symbiosis, utilizing these networks to exchange resources or warning signals. This discussion delves into the functional behaviors of plants and their movement capabilities as models to build adaptive soft robots for environmental exploration. In fact, plants can provide engineers with the rules to design and develop functional embodiments and energy-efficient behaviors, which are key for artificial machines to better navigate unstructured and challenging environments. More specifically, I will explain how plants offer new insights to generate multi-functional materials for morphological adaptation and computation, mechanisms for moving-by-growing, strategies for climbing and adhesion, as well as new forms of energy. Finally, I will discuss how plant communication solutions can inspire multi-sensory information processing and the distributed architecture of functionalities.

Bio: Barbara Mazzolai is the Associate Director for Robotics and the Director of the Bioinspired Soft Robotics Laboratory at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), Genoa. From February 2011 to March 2021, she served as the Director of the IIT Center for Micro-BioRobotics (CMBR). She earned her Bachelor's degree in Biology (with Honours) from the University of Pisa, Italy, and obtained her Ph.D. in Microsystems Engineering from the University of Rome Tor Vergata. Between July 2012 and 2017, she held the position of Deputy Director for the Supervision and Organization of the IIT Centers Network. In 2017, she was a Visiting Faculty at the Aerial Robotics Lab, Department of Aeronautics, at Imperial College London. Since 2024, she has been a contract professor for a course in soft robotics in the Department of Mechanics at the Polytechnic of Milan. Barbara Mazzolai is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (Tübingen and Stuttgart, Germany), of the SAB of the Max Planck Queensland Centre (MPQC) for the Materials Science of Extracellular Matrices, as well as of the Advisory Committee of the Cluster on Living Adaptive and Energy-autonomous Materials Systems - livMatS (Freiburg, Germany). Her research work revolves around bioinspired soft robotics, where she combines principles from both biology and engineering to advance technological innovation and scientific knowledge. She has been the Coordinator of several EU-funded projects in this field, including PLANTOID, GrowBot, and I-SEED. In May 2021, she began her European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant titled "I-Wood," focusing on Forest Intelligence: robotic networks inspired by the Wood Wide Web. Throughout her career, she has received numerous awards for her contributions, including the Marisa Bellisario Award and the Medal of the Italian Senate. She is an author and co-author of more than 260 papers published in international journals, books, and conference proceedings.

Prof. Emma Hart

Quality Diversity Approaches to the Evolution Of Robot Designs and Swarms

Bio: Professor Emma Hart has worked in the field of Evolutionary Computing for over 20 years. Her current work is mainly centred in Evolutionary Robotics, bringing together ideas on using artificial evolution as tool for optimisation with research that focuses on how robots can be made to continually learn, improving performance as they gather information from their own or other robots' experiences. The work has attracted significant media attention including recently in the New Scientist, and the Guardian. She gave a TED talk on this subject at TEDWomen in December 2021 in Palm Springs, USA which has attracted over 1 million views since being released online in April 2022. She was the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Evolutionary Computation (MIT Press) from 2017-2024 and an elected member of the ACM SIG on Evolutionary Computing. In 2022, she was honoured to be elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh for her contributions to the field of Computational Intelligence and was awarded the ACM SIGEVO Award for Outstanding Contribution to Evolutionary Computation in 2023.