Thesis Defense: Mira Radeva "A Symbiotic Perspective on Distributed Algorithms and Social Insects"

Speaker: Mira Radeva , MIT

Date: Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Time: 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM Note: all times are in the Eastern Time Zone

Refreshments: 10:00 AM

Public: Yes

Location: 32-G449

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Host: Nancy Lynch

Contact: Joanne Talbot Hanley, 617-253-6054, joanne@csail.mit.edu

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Reminders to: seminars@csail.mit.edu

Reminder Subject: TALK: Thesis Defense: Mira Radeva "A Symbiotic Perspective on Distributed Algorithms and Social Insects"

Abstract: Biological distributed algorithms are decentralized computer algorithms that solve problems related to real biological systems and provide insight into the behavior of actual biological species. The biological systems we consider are social insect colonies, and the problems we study include foraging for food (exploring the colony's surroundings), house hunting (reaching consensus on a new home for the colony), and task allocation (allocating workers to tasks in the colony). The goal is to combine the approaches used in understanding complex distributed and biological systems in order to develop (1) more formal and mathematical insights about the behavior of social insect colonies, and (2) new techniques to design simpler and more robust distributed algorithms. Our results introduce theoretical computer scientists to new metrics, new ways to think about models and lower bounds, and new types of robustness properties of algorithms. Moreover, we provide biologists with new tools and techniques to gain insight and generate hypotheses about real ant colony behavior.

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Created by Joanne Talbot Hanley at Tuesday, March 07, 2017 at 9:47 AM.