Radhika Nagpal at #NeurIPS2021: the collective intelligence of army ants

The 35th conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS2021) featured eight invited talks. In this post, we give a flavour of the final presentation. Radhika's research focusses on collective intelligence, with the overarching goal being to understand how large groups of individuals, with local interaction rules, can cooperate to achieve globally complex behaviour. Each individual is miniscule compared to the massive phenomena that they create, and, with a limited view of the actions of the rest of the swarm, they achieve striking coordination. Looking at collective intelligence from an algorithmic point-of-view, the phenomenon emerges from many individuals interacting using simple rules.