During the next SIMAI biannual congress (SIMAI 2010), Dr. Andrea Tosin (Department of Mathematics, Politecnico di Torino) and Dr. Paolo Frasca (Istituto per le Applicazioni del Calcolo) are organizing a symposium on crowds and swarm dynamics. The participation (as speaker) of this symposium is reserved to young, not tenured researchers. This symposium aims at bringing together young researchers active in the field. In accordance with the multi-disciplinary nature of the topic, the invited speakers have very different backgrounds: they are biologists, engineers, mathematicians.

The SIMAI congress will held in Cagliari (Italy), from June 21st to June 25th 2010. The exact date of the symposium during this period is not yet decided. Expected speakers are:

• José Alfredo Cañizo (Department of Mathematics, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain): Mean-field limit for collective behavior models with noise.
• Emiliano Cristiani (CEMSAC – Università di Salerno and IAC-CNR, Roma, Italy): A multiscale approach for pedestrian flow.
• Jesú Rosado (Department of Mathematics, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain): A refined result of flocking for the Cucker-Smale model.
• Juliette Venel (Department of Mathematics, Université de Valenciennes et du Hainaut-Cambrésis, France): A discrete contact model for crowd motion.
• Fiammetta Venuti (Department of Structural and Geotechnical Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, Italy): Crowd-structure interaction on footbridges, modelling of the coupled system and an application.
• And me, Simon Garnier (Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, USA): Trail geometry encodes heuristic information in the Argentine ant.