Events Calendar

EE 598 Cyber-Physical Systems Seminar Series

Speaker: Hana Koorehdavoudi , University of Southern California

Talk Title: Drawing Inspiration from Collective Motion in Nature

Abstract: Biological systems are frequently categorized as complex systems due to their capabilities of generating spatio-temporal structures from apparent random decisions. In spite of research on analyzing biological systems, we lack a quantifiable framework for measuring their complexity. To fill this gap, we develop a new paradigm to study a collective group of N agents moving and interacting in a three-dimensional space. Our paradigm helps to identify the spatio-temporal states of the motion of the group and their associated transition probabilities. This framework enables the estimation of the free energy landscape corresponding to the identified states. Based on the energy landscape, we quantify missing information, emergence, self-organization and complexity for a collective motion. We show that the collective motion of the group of agents evolves to reach the most probable state with relatively lowest energy level and lowest missing information compared to other possible states. Our analysis demonstrates that the natural group of animals exhibit a higher degree of emergence, self-organization and complexity over time. Consequently, this algorithm can be integrated into new frameworks to engineer collective motions to achieve certain degrees of emergence, self-organization and complexity.

Biography: Hana Koorehdavoudi is a PhD candidate in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Southern California. She received her BS degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Sharif University of Technology in 2010. Her research interests include cellular motility, biological swarm dynamics, applied mathematics to design and modeling of dense networks of bacteria with a potential application for therapeutic purposes (e.g. drug delivery in inaccessible regions of the human body).

Host: Paul Bogdan

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Estela Lopez