Learning the interaction structure in bird flocks from data

IAP weekly specialised seminars / Friday 2 October 2020:
Aleksandra Walczak, Laboratoire de Physique Théorique, École Normale Supérieure/UPMC/CNRS (Paris, France)

The coordinated flight of bird flocks is a striking example of collective behavior in biology. Using 3D positions and velocities of large natural flocks of starlings I will describe our efforts in attempting to find the effective dynamics driving this motion. Learning these models allows us to infer the local rules of alignment, and to reveal that flocks are poised close to a critical point, where susceptibility to external perturbations is maximal. Extending the approach to alignment dynamics shows that flocks are in a state of local quasi-equilibrium.