This study examined the moderating influence of positive neighborhood factors such as social cohesion and informal social control (collective efficacy), on the relationship between child maltreatment and aggressive behavior at age 12. Caregiver (N = 861) and youth (N = 823) dyads were interviewed when youth were aged 12 as part of a longitudinal study of child abuse and neglect (LONGSCAN). Care...

Title of dissertation: ANALYSIS AND SYNTHESIS OF COLLECTIVE MOTION: FROM GEOMETRY TO DYNAMICS Matteo Mischiati, Doctor of Philosophy, 2011 Dissertation directed by: Professor P. S. Krishnaprasad Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering The subject of this dissertation is collective motion, the coordinated motion of two or more individuals, in three-dimensional space. Inspired by the pr...

Human collective behavior can vary from calm to panicked depending on social context. Using videos publicly available online, we study the highly energized collective motion of attendees at heavy metal concerts. We find these extreme social gatherings generate similarly extreme behaviors: a disordered gas-like state called a mosh pit and an ordered vortex-like state called a circle pit. Both ph...

We have presented a numerical model of a collective opinion formation procedure to explain political phenomena such as two-party and multi-party systems in politics, political unrest, military coup d’etats and netizen revolutions. Nonlinear interaction with binary and independent decision making processes can yield various collective behaviors or collective political opinions. Statistical physi...

A conceptual architecture is presented in which a population of learning agents share a dynamic collective knowledge base but also retain individual memories, biases and learning systems. Knowledge learned by agents goes into the collective base, but each agent also has a “personality filter” that controls how the collective base affects its individual base. An application in virtual worlds is ...

Starting with a group of reinforcement-learning agents we derive coupled replicator equations that describe the dynamics of collective learning in multiagent systems. We show that, although agents model their environment in a self-interested way without sharing knowledge, a game dynamics emerges naturally through environment-mediated interactions. An application to rock-scissors-paper game inte...

Detection and analysis of collective behavior in natural and artificial systems is a difficult task which is commonly delegated to a human observer. We present a statistical framework to automatically detect emergent, collective behavior of agents in agent based simulations which exhibit swarming and flocking behavior. Our tunable, transitional-, rotational, and scaleinvariant framework – geome...

This article comparatively tests three cooperative co-evolution methods for automated controller design in simulated robot teams. Collective NeuroEvolution (CONE) co-evolves multiple robot controllers using emergent behavioral specialization in order to increase collective behavior task performance. CONE is comparatively evaluated with two related controller design methods in a collective const...