Conference: Modeling Complexity Across Levels: Social Insect Societies As Multilevel Integrated Systems to be held at the Santa Fe Institute, on May 22-26, 2002.

Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe NM

Investigators

Abstract

"Modeling complexity across levels: social insect societies as multilevel integrated systems." Social insect colonies provide a "model system" for understanding biological complexity. They are exemplars of multi-component, multi-level causal structures. All levels of organization are involved in the production, maintenance and modulation of behavior in a colony of ants, bees, wasps or termites from genetic effects on neurological process and behavior to selection effects at the group and individual levels The recent explosion of research on complex systems in general has produced a variety of new theoretical, mathematical and computational tools with which to model spatial and temporal dynamical processes. Models of self-organization, evolutionary computation, functional genomics, data mining, multi-agent simulations, etc. can clearly aid in the understanding of complex social insect behavior. The PIs will bring together graduate students, postdocs and junior faculty members who study processes at different levels of organization of social insects with those developing some of the current array of modeling methods. The purpose of this workshop is to educate the next generation of researchers about multilevel approaches to behavior science, and to tighten the connection between empirical studies and abstract modeling efforts. The workshop will be held at the Santa Fe Institute, and is structured as a tutorial. That is, it will be highly interactive with hands-on applications of the models to current research questions and data. The PIs expect that new collaborations will arise from this workshop, that generalizations about integrating models will be discovered, and that these results will be relevant to a wider scientific community investigating complexity.