Events & News
Colloquium
| Category | Lecture |
| Date | Tuesday, October 21, 2008 |
| Time | 11:00 am |
| Location | GS 906 |
| Details | Light refreshments will be served at 10:45AM in the 9th floor atrium. |
| Speaker | Anna Dornhaus |
| Title | Assistant Professor |
| Affiliation | Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UA |
Algorithms for distributed problem-solving: when & how do they work in social insects
Social insects display sophisticated collective problem-solving strategies without central control, and are therefore a model for self-organization and distributed intelligence. We study how and why these distributed strategies work: what are the benefits of distributed vs. centralized allocation of workers to tasks? What are the benefits of information flow vs. independent agents? Under what conditions may a group comprising different specialized agents operate more effectively than a group of identical agents? We are interested in understanding how environmental conditions have shaped the evolution of social insect behavior, and what makes social insects so successful compared to their solitary relatives. However, our results may also have implications for the design and effective use of distributed problem-solving strategies in engineering applications.
My homepage is at
http://eebweb.arizona.edu/Faculty/Dornhaus/
Biography
Positions and Education
August 2005 to present: Assistant Professor, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona
2002-2005, Visiting Fellow, School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol
2002, Associate Researcher, Dept. of Artificial Intelligence, University of Würzburg
2002, Ph.D., Zoology, University of Würzburg
1999, Diplom (=M.S.), Biology, University of Würzburg