Publications associées à Social network plasticity decreases disease transmission in a eusocial insect

Targeted worker removal reveals a lack of flexibility in brood transport specialisation with no compensatory gain in efficiency

Laurent Keller, Mahmut Selman Sakar, Fazil Emre Uslu

Division of labour is widely thought to increase the task efficiency of eusocial insects. Workers can switch their task to compensate for sudden changes in demand, providing flexible task allocation. In combination with automated tracking technology, we de ...

Nature Research2024

A Biohybrid Superorganism - Investigating honeybees' collective behaviors via interactive robotics

Rafael Botner Barmak

Social insects, such as ants, termites, and honeybees, have evolved sophisticated societies where the collaborative efforts of "simple" individuals can lead to the emergence of complex dynamics. The reliance of each organism on the collective is so great t ...

EPFL2024

Biohybrid Superorganisms—On the Design of a Robotic System for Thermal Interactions With Honeybee Colonies

Francesco Mondada, Robert Matthew Mills, Rafael Botner Barmak, Raphael Cherfan

Social insects, such as ants, termites, and honeybees, have evolved sophisticated societies where collaboration and division of labor enhance survival of the whole colony, and are thus considered “superorganisms”. Historically, studying behaviors involving ...

2024

Predicting the long-term collective behaviour of fish pairs with deep learning

Francesco Mondada, Alexandre Massoud Alahi, Vaios Papaspyros

Modern computing has enhanced our understanding of how social interactions shape collective behaviour in animal societies. Although analytical models dominate in studying collective behaviour, this study introduces a deep learning model to assess social in ...

2024

An Autonomous Robotic Platform to Manipulate Collective Behavior in Ants

Matthias Rüegg

Eusocial life is characterized by division of labour, collective decision making and self organization, and regarded as the highest form of social organisation in groups. Ants are a model organism for research in collective behavior and the evolution of eu ...

EPFL2023

Get More for Less in Decentralized Learning Systems

Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Jeffrey Wigger, Akash Balasaheb Dhasade, Milos Vujasinovic, Rafael Pereira Pires, Rishi Sharma

Decentralized learning (DL) systems have been gaining popularity because they avoid raw data sharing by communicating only model parameters, hence preserving data confidentiality. However, the large size of deep neural networks poses a significant challeng ...

IEEE2023

Host-Pathogen Interactions Through the Genomic Lens

Zhi Ming Xu

Hosts and pathogens are involved in a long-standing evolutionary arms race characterized by successive rounds of evolution. Specifically, while hosts evolve resistance against infections, pathogens adapt to re-establish virulence. Since the signatures of t ...

EPFL2023

The evolution of behavioral cues and signaling in displaced communication

Dario Floreano, Laurent Keller

Displaced communication, whereby individuals communicate regarding a subject that is not immediately present (spatially or temporally), is one of the key features of human language. It also occurs in a few animal species, most notably the honeybee, where t ...

2023

Transcriptomic analysis reveals mitochondrial pathways associated with distinct adolescent behavioral phenotypes and stress response

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Dogukan Hazar Ülgen, Thamyris Silva

Adolescent individuals exhibit great variability in cortical dynamics and behavioral outcomes. The developing adolescent brain is highly sensitive to social experiences and environmental insults, influencing how personality traits emerge. A distinct patter ...

2023

Time vs. Truth: Age-Distortion Tradeoffs and Strategies for Distributed Inference

Yunus Inan

In 1948, Claude Shannon laid the foundations of information theory, which grew out of a study to find the ultimate limits of source compression, and of reliable communication. Since then, information theory has proved itself not only as a quest to find the ...

EPFL2023

Explainability and Graph Learning From Social Interactions

Ali H. Sayed, Stefan Vlaski, Konstantinos Ntemos, Valentina Shumovskaia

Social learning algorithms provide models for the formation of opinions over social networks resulting from local reasoning and peer-to-peer exchanges. Interactions occur over an underlying graph topology, which describes the flow of information among the ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2022

The interplay between human genetic variation, chronic inflammation and persistent infection: relevance for cardiovascular morbidity

Flavia Aurelia Shoko Hodel

Contemporary genomic approaches allow us to seek answers to biological questions that were previously out of reach. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous genetic polymorphisms associated with human diseases, providing new insight ...

EPFL2022

Investigating cognitive ability using action-based models of structural brain networks

Enrico Amico

Recent developments in network neuroscience have highlighted the importance of developing techniques for analysing and modelling brain networks. A particularly powerful approach for studying complex neural systems is to formulate generative models that use ...

OXFORD UNIV PRESS2022

Cecropins contribute to Drosophila host defense against a subset of fungal and Gram-negative bacterial infection

Bruno Lemaitre, Alexia Laurie Carboni, Mark Austin Hanson

Cecropins are small helical secreted peptides with antimicrobial activity that are widely distributed among insects. Genes encoding Cecropins are strongly induced upon infection, pointing to their role in host defense. In Drosophila, four cecropin genes cl ...

OXFORD UNIV PRESS INC2022

Epidemic mitigation by statistical inference from contact tracing data

Maria Refinetti, Giovanni Catania, Florent Gérard Krzakala, Lenka Zdeborová, Indaco Biazzo

Contact tracing is an essential tool to mitigate the impact of a pandemic, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to achieve efficient and scalable contact tracing in real time, digital devices can play an important role. While a lot of attention has been ...

National Academy of Sciences2021

Learning-based Image Coding: Early Solutions Reviewing and Subjective Quality Evaluation

Touradj Ebrahimi, Pinar Akyazi

Nowadays, image and video are the data types that consume most of the resources of modern communication channels, both in fixed and wireless networks. Thus, it is vital to compress visual data as much as possible, while maintaining some target quality leve ...

SPIE-INT SOC OPTICAL ENGINEERING2021

The role of immune effectors in controlling Drosophila-microbes interactions

Alice Marra

All live beings are in constant interaction with microorganisms that may be beneficial, deleterious or commensal. Insects in particular live in close contact with microorganisms. This is especially true for species, like the fruit fly Drosophila melanogast ...

EPFL2021

True scale-free networks hidden by finite size effects

Andrea Rinaldo, Samir Suweis, Amos Maritan

We analyze about 200 naturally occurring networks with distinct dynamical origins to formally test whether the commonly assumed hypothesis of an underlying scale-free structure is generally viable. This has recently been questioned on the basis of statisti ...

National Academy of Sciences2021

Sensor and the Beast: Generalised Methods to Recognise Animal Behaviour and Quantify Energy Expenditure Using Inertial Sensors, and Applications

Pritish Chakravarty

How an animal allocates time and energy to different activities has repercussions for its survival, fitness, and response to changing environmental conditions. Fine-scale information on animal behaviour and energy expenditure can help develop better inform ...

EPFL2020

Accurate Nod and 3D Gaze Estimation for Social Interaction Analysis

Yu Yu

Non-verbal behaviours play an important role in human communication since it can indicate human attention, serve as communication cue in interactions, or even reveal higher level personal constructs. For instance, head nod, a common non-verbal behaviour, c ...

EPFL2020