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SUMMARY:Collective random-walks: looking for new foraging currencies - Dan
 iel Campos (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
DTSTART:20230906T130000Z
DTEND:20230906T140000Z
UID:TALK204733@talks.cam.ac.uk
DESCRIPTION:Researchers (specially mathematicians and physicists) have dev
 eloped during the last years the so-called &ldquo\;Stochastic optimal fora
 ging theory&rdquo\;\, which tries to incorporate explicitly spatial effect
 s and movement into the evolutionary tradeoffs driving biological foraging
 . &nbsp\;\nFrom the formal point of view\, the field has focused much on t
 he idea of computing Mean First-Passage Times (MFPTs)\, or related measure
 s\, of a random walker (representing a biological organism) through a targ
 et (representing food). Then\, minimization of these MFPTs with respect to
  the random-walk parameters is conveniently interpreted as an optimal fora
 ging strategy.&nbsp\;\nHowever\, the extension of this idea to social/coll
 ective foraging is not straightforward\, as it introduces many new ingredi
 ents (individual vs collective optimization\, the role of interactions and
  communication\, ...) into the equation. Finding simple\, practical and ro
 bust statistical measures/currencies of foraging under these conditions re
 presents a beautiful open problem at the frontier between ecology and math
 ematics. The idea of the talk is to present some key aspects about this pr
 oblem I find particularly interesting\, and then open a discussion about i
 ts multiple solutions/branches. &nbsp\;
LOCATION:Seminar Room 2\, Newton Institute
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