About this Research Topic
This Research Topic calls for contributions that illustrate and discuss innovative methods and technologies that crucially contribute to shed new light on collective behaviors, enhancing its understanding. For example, the observation of collective behaviors in natural setting has been made more informative through the use of technologies that facilitated tracking of the individual behavior in large groups. New computational modeling techniques and machine learning methods have been used to account for the effect produced by the level of connectivity among the system components, and to uncover hidden patterns and correlations in massive data about social behavior. Virtual reality environments have been used to observe the responses of single individuals in an experimentally controlled crowd. Moreover, new insights into the principles of collective behavior have been generated through the development of techniques to control and guide the collective response of a group of natural and artificial agents. Multi-robot systems and simulations of embodied multi-agent systems are methodological platforms that have been used to generate and test new hypotheses on the cognitive mechanisms required by agents engaged in complex collective dynamics. These tools have also been used to look at the effects of genetic/behavioral heterogeneities on the emergence of global responses. The use of mixed societies made of animals and artificial agents have facilitated the setup of controlled experimental conditions in which the behavior of single system components can be experimentally manipulated to look at their effects on the population-level response.
In conclusion, this Research Topic welcomes cross-disciplinary contributions that—through the use of innovative technologies and methods like those mentioned above—contribute to push forward our understanding of collective behavior in natural and artificial systems.
Keywords: Collective Behavior, Self-Organization, Complex Systems, Swarm Intelligence
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.