I recently found an interesting interview of Iain Couzin on Edge.org. Iain Couzin is Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University. His research focuses on understanding collective behaviours. In particular he is interested in how large-scale biological patterns result from the actions and interactions of the individual components of [...]

Scientific American has just published a special edition about robotics. It gathers many interesting articles about most of the current hot topics in robotics. Among them is a new version of “Swarm Smarts“, an article written by Eric Bonabeau and Guy Theraulaz in 2000 for the same journal, where the approach of swarm intelligence is [...]

I recently read the following post by Zyxo on Mixotricha blog about complexity which illustrates one fundamental flaw in many studies of swarm intelligence: the assumption that the subunits in a swarm-intelligent system are necessarily dumb.

Interesting post from Ryan Hollingsworth as guest blogger for LeRon Shults about swarm intelligence. At the end he poses the [...]

I recently read a paper by Fang Wu and Bernardo Huberman called “Novelty and collective attention“. This paper speak about how attention to novel items propagates and eventually fades among large populations. In particular, they analyzed the dynamics of collective attention among 1 million users of the interactive website digg.com. This website allows its users [...]

We as human beings are essentially visual animals. Representations are therefore of major importance for our understanding of the world around. This is especially true when we are dealing with complex systems where a large number of agents are continually interacting together. Visualization tools are required to help us give a sense to the apparent [...]

Hereafter is a link toward the video of Guy Theraulaz’s talk at the 2007 European Conference on Complex Systems. This talk is directly related to the article “The biological principles of swarm intelligence” we wrote together for the first issue of the Swarm Intelligence journal.

The Biological Principles of Swarm Intelligence
ECCS07 talk - Guy Theraulaz
For [...]

I recently decided to start an online bibliography database about collective behaviours. I am nearly certain that such an online database does not exist but should be useful to many people. The goal of this database is to make an inventory of all kind of publications related to collective behaviours in general, in both natural [...]

Je reproduis ici la lettre au Président de la République de Cédric Foellmi publiée il y a quelques jours sur le site “Sauvons la recherche”. Loin des clichés habituels sur l’intérêt de la recherche fondamentale, ce jeune chercheur, post-doc au laboratoire d’astrophysique de Grenoble, propose un argumentaire original pour défendre le financement de ce type [...]

I recently found this website about collective behaviours in animal societies: www.collective-behavior.com. This website is designed around the book ‘Collective Animal Behaviour’ by Professor David Sumpter. The book will be finished during 2008 and published by Princeton University Press. This website provides draft versions of some of the chapters which will appear in the book, [...]

Hereafter are two videos showing bio-inspired swarm robotics behaviours implemented with e-puck robots by the students of the swarm robotics atelier at the EAIA’07 summerschool on collective robotics. The first behaviour is inspired by the collective choice of shelters displayed by cockroaches. The video shows only a part of the process, during which a group [...]