Biological and Artificial Swarms

October 3 - 4, 2003

Overview

A commonly observed natural phenomenon is the cohesive movement of a biological population. The purpose of this workshop is to foster advances in the modeling and analysis of such biological swarms, and to explore how ideas from swarming might be applied to construct efficient algorithms for autonomous agents. This highly interdisciplinary endeavor will draw from ideas in biology (experimental and theoretical), mathematics (including PDEs, dynamical systems, and numerical analysis), physics (statistical mechanics and nonequilibrium thermodynamics) and computer science and engineering (distributed artificial intelligence).

Swarming is a broad and developing research area. The focus of this workshop will be on problems from biology and multi-agent algorithms in which mathematics can make a contribution. The attendees will include junior and senior scientists from the varied fields mentioned above, who may not generally attend the same scientific conferences or publish in the same scientific journals. The diverse backgrounds of the attendees and a multi-format workshop structure will help forge new scientific relationships and collaborations.