You are cordially invited to the 30th annual

Dr. Shih-I Pai Lecture

with

Naomi Ehrich Leonard
Chair and Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University

on

"Fast and Flexible Group Decision-Making"

Tuesday, December 3, 2024
3 p.m.
Physics Lecture Hall
1410 John S. Toll Physics Building

If you have a question about this event, including disability accommodations, please contact Anıl Zenginoğlu at anil@umd.edu.

About the Talk
A wide range of animals live and move in groups. Many animals do better in groups than alone when, for example, foraging for food, migrating, and avoiding predators. A key to group success is social interaction. Less well understood is how a group, with no centralized control, is capable of the fast and flexible decision-making required to carry out its tasks in an environment with uncertainty, variability, and dynamic change.

I will introduce an approach to modeling group decision-making dynamics that reveals the fundamental importance of nonlinearity, feedback, and social interaction. Analysis of the model provides new insights into fast and flexible decision-making: how indecision can be broken as fast as it becomes costly, and how sensitivity to stimulus can be tuned as context and environment change. I will discuss the significance of these results for the study and design of collective intelligence in nature and technology.

About the Speaker
Naomi Ehrich Leonard is Chair and Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. She is associated faculty with the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics and the Biophysics Graduate Program, and affiliated faculty with the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. She was Director of Princeton's Council on Science and Technology from 2013 to 2023 and is Founding Director of CreativeX, a Princeton engineering-and-the-arts collective. She is Founding Editor of the Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems. Leonard received her B.S.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Princeton University and her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the ASME, IEEE, IFAC, and SIAM. Recent awards include the 2023 IEEE Control Systems Award and the 2024 Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award.

Leonard's background includes feedback control theory, nonlinear dynamics, geometric mechanics, and robotics, where she has contributed to theory and application. She studies and designs complex, dynamical systems comprised of many interacting agents, such as animals, humans, and autonomous vehicles, that move, sense, and decide together. She develops analytically tractable mathematical models of collective dynamics that provide the systematic means to examine the role of feedback, interconnection, and individual differences in the behavior, learning, and resilience of groups in changing environments.

Leonard’s collaborators have included researchers in oceanography, ecology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and political science, and artists. Past art collaborations include “FlockLogic” (2010) with choreographer Susan Marshall and “There Might Be Others” (2016) with choreographer Rebecca Lazier and composer Dan Trueman. Her newest art project “Rhythm Bots” is a kinetic sculpture that explores synchrony, rhythmic entrainment, and human-robot interaction.

About the Lecture
Dr. Shih-I Pai (1913-1996) served on the faculty of the University of Maryland at College Park beginning in 1949 and retired with Emeritus status in 1983. He was the recipient of a Centennial Medal from the A. James Clark School of Engineering and was a founding member of the Institute for Fluid Dynamics and Applied Mathematics (now the Institute for Physical Science and Technology). Dr. Pai authored 14 books and 130 articles in the field of aerodynamics, fluid dynamics and viscous flow, for which he received international recognition. The lecture series honors Dr. Pai's many accomplishments and contributions to UMCP and is supported by donations to the University of Maryland Foundation.