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Welcome!

Welcome to the pages of the research group “Collective Information Processing” at the Institute for Theoretical Biology, Department of Biology, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, associated with the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin and the excellence cluster  Science of Intelligence. Want to stay up-to-date? Follow the twitter account of our collaboration together with the Bierbach… Read More »

New preprint

Recently a new preprint from our lab has been uploaded to arXiv with Pascal Klamser as first author. In this work we put the so-called “criticality hypothesis” to the test, which states that biological collective information processing systems in order  to optimize their performance, should operate close to a phase transition, i.e. a critical point… Read More »

New paper on vision-based flocking!

Our new paper on vision-based flocking is out! Renaud Bastien and Pawel Romanczuk formulate a mathematical framework for social interactions in groups of agents based only on information available in the visual input received by individuals. Then, following a bottom-up approach, we formulate a minimal vision-based model: Agents only see black & white – something… Read More »

New preprint on flocking in complex environments

Today a new preprint by Parisa Rahmani, Fernando Peruani and Pawel Romanczuk, has been published on arXiv. Using a generic flocking model we investigate the role of limited attention on collective information processing in complex environments. The main result is rather surprising and counters the established knowledge in flocking behavior as well as more generally… Read More »

New preprint on purely vision -based model of collective movement

Check out the new bioRxiv preprint by Renaud Bastien, Department of Collective Behavior, MPI Konstanz and Pawel Romanczuk. In this manuscript, we introduce a mathematical framework for purely vision-based social interactions in agent-groups, and how it leads to self-organized emergence of collective movement. Already the simplest models – without any representation of distance or object… Read More »

New preprint on collective decision making!

Check out the new arXiv preprint by Bryan C. Daniels and Pawel Romanczuk. In this paper we explore the role of higher order network structure in collective decision making. More specifically, we investigate the speed-accuracy trade-off in collective binary decisions, how it is affected by degree heterogeneity across nodes, e.g. a so-called rich-club structure, and… Read More »

Success for SCIoI !!!

On Thursday, Sep 27th 2018, we got the amazing news that our application for the cluster of excellence Science of Intelligence got selected for funding within the German excellence funding program. Pawel Romanczuk and Jens Krause will contribute their expertise to explore principles of social and collective intelligence within the consortium of in total 21… Read More »

New preprint out!

Check out our new preprint entitled “Searching for structure in collective systems” by Colin Twomey (U Penn) as the main author, co-authored by Pawel Romanczuk. The manuscript proposes a novel, information theoretic method for quantifying collective systems. The method does not make any assumptions about the nature of interactions in the collective, e.g. it does… Read More »

Lab on tour…

This week Pawel Romanczuk is greatly honored to be an invited speaker at the Ising Lectures, at the Institute for Condensed Matter Physics in Lviv/Ukraine on invitation by Prof. Holovatch. In parallel, there is a great ICTP conference in Trieste/Italy on Collective Behavior. From our lab Parisa, Pascal and Yinong are attending it, and Pawel… Read More »

Our new paper appeared in Ecology Letters!

Recently the paper “How ecology shapes exploitation: a framework to predict the behavioural response of human and animal foragers along exploration-exploitation trade-offs.”, co-authored by Pawel Romanczuk appeared in Ecology Letters. Therein, we propose a novel framework for understanding how spatio-temporal dynamics of ressources shape the social interaction between competing agents by combining theory with a… Read More »

New Robofish paper is out!

A new paper from the Robofish team, just appeared online! The Robofish project is an exciting interdisciplinary collaboration between fish biologist around David Bierbach & Jens Krause, bio-roboticist around Tim Landgraf and our lab. In this specific paper the robotic fish was used probe the social behavior of surface and cave-dwelling fish. Thanks to all… Read More »