Research

Non-CDC Research Projects:

• Higher-Order Analysis of Knowledge Capacity and Learning Potential in Social Animal Groups

The ability to efficiently disseminate, process, and successfully act on quality information is central to most decision making processes in social animal groups. From searching for a new home to avoiding predation, the ability to efficiently and effectively reach consensus plays a large part in the ultimate survival of the population. Traditional computational models have studied these interaction scenarios using networks to understand the percolation of information and the potential limitations to successful communication. However, due to the highly variable ways in which these social populations need to coordinate both prior to and during a decision-making event, it is necessary to understand more than simple pairwise communication processes in order to more accurately capture the communication dynamics involved in knowledge transfer and decision making and in turn to reveal how communication structure and distribution of information within social populations shape these processes. We define and utilize a novel framework based in concepts from algebraic topology which allows us to more efficiently capture n-way communication and knowledge transfer among members of a social population and subsequently identify elements of communication structure that affect the information capacity and learning potential of the population. We then apply these findings to gain insight to the effects of natural selection on communication structure given the selective pressure of efficient communication in social groups.

• Effects of Family Units on the Evolution of Social Structures

There are many social animal groups which maintain long-term social bonds with family members. Traditional evolutionary explanations for this typically invoke Hamiltonian inclusive fitness to justify the extra costs inherent in maintaining these bonds. We utilize network models of selfishly-motivated self-organizing societies to explore the evolutionary trade-off between inclusion and maintenance of family groups and the ability of a population to sustain a well-organized social structure. This allows us to contrast the impact of maintaining family bonds to the global social environment of the population, as well as the local impact to individuals within the population via inclusive fitness in the face of various types of selective pressures.

• Optimizing Resource Allocation and Evacuation Strategies in Urban Crises

A collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in an effort to model public health responses to crisis events in urban centers, specifically in the case of an extreme heat event or an epidemic of infectious disease. In such cases, it is possible for a city to have a spike in individuals seeking medical treatment such that the existing facilities are inadequate to handle all cases. One response of public health officials would be to convert public buildings such as schools, libraries, or sports stadia for use as temporary medical facilities to supply treatment to the overflow. We employ individual-based modeling to examine which facilities would be the best options for such conversions, as well as how to route the population in such a way as to minimize loss of life.