Lecturer: Jennifer Fewell
Fields: Biology; Collective Behavior
Content
This course will explore the social organization and collective behavior of social insects from a biological perspective. The social insects are models for coordination and cooperation across small to large scales. Their distributed communication systems have been used extensively as inspiration for applied questions in coordination and collective behavior, from supply chains to robotics and beyond. Is a social insect colony the original collective \”AI\”? – well probably not, but it will be a fun question to explore!
Lecturer
Jennifer Fewell is a President\’s Professor at Arizona State University, where she served as the founding Director of the Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity. She has served also as President of the Animal Behavior Society and the International Union for the Study of Social Insects. She studies social organization and division of labor in social insects, and mechanisms and evolution of social cooperation across a range of species. She received her MS and PhD from the University of Colorado.
Affiliation: Arizona State University