In this talk, I will present a new interdisciplinary approach that I have been developing in recent years, aiming to build a bridge between the fields of algorithm theory and collective (animal) behavior. Ideally, an algorithmic perspective on biological phenomena can provide a level of fundamental understanding that is difficult to achieve using typical computational tools employed in this area of research (e.g., differential equations or computer simulations). In turn, this fundamental understanding can provide both qualitative and quantitative predictions that can guide biological research in unconventional directions. I will demonstrate this novel approach by presenting a sequence of works on collective ant navigation (published in the biology journals eLife 2016 and eLife 2020, and the CS venues ESA 2018 and TALG 2021), whose experimental part was done in collaboration with the Feinerman ant lab at the Weizmann Institute. In the second part of the talk, I will present a recent result (published in Science Advances 2021) regarding the search efficiency of common animal movement patterns, addressing a long-standing open problem in the area of foraging. I will conclude the talk by discussing potential avenues to employ an algorithmic perspective in biological contexts.
Amos Korman received his Ph.D. in computer science at the Weizmann Institute of Science in May 2006, under the guidance of Prof. David Peleg. His Ph.D. thesis won Dean's prize for Ph.D. students. He then continued for two years of postdoc at the Technion and has been a researcher at CNRS, France, since Nov. 2007. In 2015 Amos received his Habilitation and in 2017 he was promoted to the rank "Directeur de Recherche". Until 2014 Amos worked primarily in the areas of distributed computing and graph algorithms. Around that time, he made a shift in his research focus, aiming to study biological phenomena through an algorithmic perspective. To support this pioneering initiative Amos received an ERC Consolidator Grant that lasted during the years 2015 - 2021. In 2020 Amos received the SIROCCO Prize for Innovation in Distributed Computing. As mentioned in the laudatio, the award was given for "pioneering contributions to distributed computing methods for system biology''.