Computational Behavioral Ecology: Why Zebras Don't Have Facebook?

Computation has fundamentally changed the way we study nature, from molecules to ecosystems. New data collection technology, such as GPS, high definition cameras, UAVs, genotyping, and crowdsourcing, are generating data about wild populations that are orders of magnitude richer than any previously collected. Such data offer the promise of answering some of the big questions about why animals do what they do, among other things. Unfortunately, in the domain of behavioral ecology and population dynamics, as in many others, our ability to analyze data lags substantially behind our ability to collect it. In this talk, I will give a brief overview of how computational approaches can be part of every stage of the scientific process of understanding animal sociality, from intelligent data collection (identifying individual animals from photographs by stripes and spots, sampling and inferring social networks) to hypothesis formulation (by designing a novel computational framework for analysis of dynamic social networks), and providing scientific insight into collective behavior of zebras, baboons, and humans.