We all experience complexity in everyday life, where simple answers are hard to find and the consequences of our actions are difficult to predict. Modern science recognizes that problems involving the collective behavior of many interacting elements are often “complex”. These systems typically display collective, organized behaviors that cannot be predicted from usual atomistic studies of their...

From flocking birds, to organ generation, to swarming bacterial colonies, biological systems often exhibit collective behaviors. Here, we review recent advances in our understanding of collective dynamics in cell populations. We argue that understanding population-level oscillations requires examining the system under consideration at three different levels of complexity: at the level of isolat...

Many behaviors have been attributed to internal conflict within the animal and human mind. However, internal conflict has not been reconciled with evolutionary principles, in that it appears maladaptive relative to a seamless decision-making process. We study this problem through a mathematical analysis of decision-making structures. We find that, under natural physiological limitations, an opt...

A collective variable approach is used to map domains of existence for (3+1)-dimensional spatiotemporal soliton solutions of a complex cubic-quintic Ginzburg-Landau equation. A rich variety of evolution behaviors, which include stationary and pulsating dissipative soliton dynamics, is revealed. Comparisons between the results obtained by the semianalytical approach of collective variables, and ...

In human crowds as well as in many animal societies, local interactions among individuals often give rise to self-organized collective organizations that offer functional benefits to the group. For instance, flows of pedestrians moving in opposite directions spontaneously segregate into lanes of uniform walking directions. This phenomenon is often referred to as a smart collective pattern, as i...

Crowd motion in surveillance videos is comparable to heat motion of basic particles. Inspired by that, we introduce Boltzmann Entropy to measure crowd motion in optical flow field so as to detect abnormal collective behaviors. As a result, the collective crowd moving pattern can be represented as a time series. We found that when most people behave anomaly, the entropy value will increase drast...

We have characterized several dynamic aspects of a simple chemical system capable of self-movement: An oil droplet in water system. We focused on spontaneous mode switching and collective behavior of droplets as emergent properties of the system. Droplets demonstrated spontaneous mode switching by changing speed, direction and acceleration over time, and collective behaviors of droplets resulte...

Individual behavior change is a necessary condition for making a positive societal transition to a resourceconstrained future. Because we live on a planet with finite resources, behavior change interventions need to move beyond creating “green consumers” and instead foster and support “green citizens.” Green consumerism has proven largely ineffective in curbing collective rates of consumption; ...

In the recent literature, several hypotheses have been offered to explain patterns of human behavior in social environments. In particular, these patterns include 'prosocial' ones, such as fairness, cooperation, and collective good provision. Psychologists suggest that these prosocial behaviors are driven not by miscalculations, but by salience of social identity, in-group favoritism, emotion, ...

study of collective actions is related to some of the most important issues in contemporary sociology such as cooperation, collective decision making, emergence of social norms etc. this paper in four steps presents a framework for studying collective actions. these steps are related to characteristics of collective actions (cooperation and common good), factors effecting the emergence of colle...