Wisdom of the Swarm: Bugs, Bots and Beyond?

Super-organisms, such as insect societies, solve complex problems collectively without centralized planning, achieving outcomes on scales far larger than the individual. This talk examines how social insects regulate their environments by constructing and deconstructing functional architectures, linking physics and behavior through local sensing and global environmental fields. The speaker will also discuss experiments with simple robots to explore these collective behaviors, offering insights into broader patterns of collective intelligence in nature and beyond. Speaker L. Mahadevan, Professor of Physics, de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University