Fast and Flexible Group Decision-Making

A wide range of animals live and move in groups. Many animals do better in groups than alone when, for example, foraging for food, migrating and avoiding predators. A key to group success is social interaction. Less well understood is how a group with no centralized control is capable of the fast and flexible decision-making required to carry out its tasks in an environment with uncertainty, variability and dynamic change.

In this Presidential Lecture, Naomi Ehrich Leonard will present a model of group decision-making dynamics that reveals the fundamental importance of nonlinearity, feedback and social interaction structure. The model provides new insights into fast and flexible decision-making: how indecision can be broken as fast as it becomes costly and how sensitivity to stimuli can be tuned as the context and environment change.

Leonard uses tools from feedback control and nonlinear dynamics to study and design the dynamics of interacting agents such as animal groups and robot teams. She develops analytically tractable mathematical models to examine feedback, interconnection and heterogeneity in the behavior, learning and resilience of groups in changing environments. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers, the International Federation of Automatic Control and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.