ASAB Interdisciplinary Workshop
Biohybrid Systems in Animal Behaviour
6-8 September 2023, Swansea University (UK)
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Invited Participants
Our Workshop is organized around three topics, with one day devoted to each topic.
Each morning begins with invited plenaries and a series of flash talks from workshop participants. In the afternoon, another plenary kicks off the flexible discussion and interaction between the participants. Each day's afternoon plenary speaker will act as a "Moderator" for the session, responsible for facilitating open discussion among participants. An invited "Rapporteur" will gather information during the afternoon sessions to track potential outputs and outcomes. The Moderator and Rapporteur roles are inspired by the format of Ernst Strüngmann Forums.
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Morning Plenary Speakers
Prof. Dr. Tim Landgraf
Dr. Blair Costelloe
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#3 | coexistence
Dr. Sabine Hauert
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#1 | cooperation
#2 | control
Afternoon Plenary Speakers - Moderators
#2 | control
Dr. James Herbert-Read
James Herbert-Read is an Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge. His research investigates the causes and consequences of animal behaviour, with a strong focus on marine organisms. With his group, he asks; how do animals gather information from their social and physical environment? How do animals use this information to inform their behavioural decisions? And why do animals adopt particular behavioural strategies over others? They primarily use fishes as model systems to answer these questions. Their research framework uses theory-driven questions, manipulative experimental methods, and highly quantitative data acquisition techniques to analyse and interpret behaviour. They use this framework in controlled laboratory experiments as well as in the field to understand the outstanding diversity of behavioural adaptations in marine organisms.
https://www.zoo.cam.ac.uk/research/behavioural-ecology/marine-behavioural-ecology-group
Prof. Dr. Dawn Scott
Dr. Vito Trianni
Vito Trianni is a senior researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the Italian National Research Council (ISTC-CNR). His research focuses on swarm intelligence, with particular emphasis on the design and analysis of complex self-organising systems, both natural and artificial (e.g., robot swarms). He believes that intelligence can be recognised in a collective of interacting units (from social insects to robots and humans) as a result of the shared problem-solving abilities.
#1 | cooperation
#3 | coexistence
Morning Invited Speakers - Rapporteurs
#1 | cooperation
Dr. Vivek Hari Sridhar
Vivek Hari Sridhar is a post-doctoral researcher in the Department for the Ecology of Animal Societies, at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. His interests lie in understanding fundamental principles that govern spatiotemporal computation in biological systems. To do this, he uses various techniques in computer vision and machine learning for data-preprocessing and analysis. By taking inspiration from statistical physics and combining this with mathematical models and individual based simulations, he hopes to elucidate the link between the individual and the group at both generational and evolutionary timescales.
#2 | control
Dr. Giovanni Polverino
#3 | coexistence
Dr. Mary Katherine Heinrich
Giovanni Polverino is an Assistant Prof. at University of Tuscia (Italy), a Visiting Research Fellow at Monash University (Australia), and an Adjunct Research Fellow at The University of Western Australia (Australia). He is interested to understand how animals respond to environmental changes, to predict species responses to a rapidly changing world. His newly-born lab focuses on causes and consequences of diversity and plasticity in animal phenotypes – from both ecological and evolutionary perspectives – focusing on behavioural and life-history traits. Over the last 10 years, some of his work took advantage from the use of finely controllable bio-inspired robots as tools for studying decision-making processes in fishes, including social and anti-predator behaviours, and controlling the behaviour and life-history of invasive species.
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