Albert Kao

Assistant Professor, Biology Department, University of Massachusetts Boston

The wisdom of crowds in naturalistic conditions

February 24, 2022 - 12:00 PM Eastern Time

Location:

UVM Innovation Hall, Room E100, Burlington Vermont, USA

Virtual Location:

Zoom

Talk Abstract:

The ‘wisdom of crowds’ (whereby groups of humans or animals make better decisions than individuals) has attracted a great deal of attention, inspiring many researchers to search for signals of it across many species and contexts. However, the model that this intuition is based on is highly simplistic and its assumptions are easily violated when real animals make decisions in real environments. Here, I describe a series of models that I’ve developed with collaborators that add in features of natural environments to models of collective decision-making. We find that these features tend to substantially alter, and sometimes reverse, our predictions of how the wisdom of crowds behaves in nature, and reveals several new mechanisms by which animals could potentially exploit to improve their decision accuracy when living in a group.

Speaker Bio:

In January 2022, I will be joining the University of Massachusetts Boston as an Assistant Professor of Biology. I will be looking to hire talented and motivated folks to join my lab, particularly graduate students (to start in fall 2022 or later) -- if you may be interested in studying collective decision-making using theory, models, and/or experiments, please write to me and let's discuss possibilities!

Prior to SFI, I spent three years at Harvard University as a James S. McDonnell postdoc fellow. I received my Ph.D. in 2015 from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, under the supervision of Prof. Iain Couzin (now at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology). I received my A.B. in Physics with an emphasis in Biophysics from Harvard College in 2007.

Using a range of experimental and theoretical tools, I study the mechanisms and adaptiveness of collective behavior across biological systems, including slime molds, fish schools, ant colonies, and human groups. I am particularly interested in collective decision-making, and how features of animal groups, or the environment in which they live, affect the quality of these decisions. Please refer to my research page for details on ongoing projects.