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.

The 35th conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS2021) featured eight invited talks. In the last of our series of round-ups, 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.

Teamwork isn't just a human characteristic: Colonies of army ants will form living'scaffolding' to protect members from falling. The insects are blind and have no designated leader but, according to new research, they're able to use simple behavioral rules to develop these safety structures without the need for direct communication. Once a scaffold was built, worker ants were almost 100 percent protected from falling off steep inclines. Understanding how they design such complex structures could help engineers development self-healing materials and swarm robotics, researchers said. Army ants in Central American rainforests will build scaffolds out of their body to help them traverse steep terrain.