Inferring the rules of social interaction in migrating caribou

Social interactions are a significant factor that influence the decision-making of species ranging from humans to bacteria. In the context of animal migration, social interactions may lead to improved decision-making, greater ability to respond to environmental cues, and the cultural transmission of optimal routes. Despite their significance, the precise nature of social interactions in migrating species remains largely unknown. Here we deploy unmanned aerial systems to collect aerial footage of caribou as they undertake their migration from Victoria Island to mainland Canada. Through a Bayesian analysis of trajectories we reveal the fine-scale interaction rules of migrating caribou and show they are attracted to one another and copy directional choices of neighbours, but do not interact through clearly defined metric or topological interaction ranges. By explicitly considering the role of social information on movement decisions we construct a map of near neighbour influence that quantifies the nature of information flow in these herds. These results will inform more realistic, mechanism-based models of migration in caribou and other social ungulates, leading to better predictions of spatial use patterns and responses to changing environmental conditions. Moreover, we anticipate that the protocol we developed here will be broadly applicable to study social behaviour in a wide range of migratory and non-migratory taxa. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Collective movement ecology’

Identification of Invariant Sensorimotor Structures as a Prerequisite for the Discovery of Objects

Perceiving the surrounding environment in terms of objects is useful for any general purpose intelligent agent. In this paper, we investigate a fundamental mechanism making object perception possible, namely the identification of spatio-temporally invariant structures in the sensorimotor experience of an agent. We take inspiration from the Sensorimotor Contingencies Theory to define a computational model of this mechanism through a sensorimotor, unsupervised and predictive approach. Our model is based on processing the unsupervised interaction of an artificial agent with its environment. We show how spatio-temporally invariant structures in the environment induce regularities in the sensorimotor experience of an agent, and how this agent, while building a predictive model of its sensorimotor experience, can capture them as densely connected subgraphs in a graph of sensory states connected by motor commands. Our approach is focused on elementary mechanisms, and is illustrated with a set of simple experiments in which an agent interacts with an environment. We show how the agent can build an internal model of moving but spatio-temporally invariant structures by performing a Spectral Clustering of the graph modeling its overall sensorimotor experiences. We systematically examine properties of the model, shedding light more globally on the specificities of the paradigm with respect to methods based on the supervised processing of collections of static images.Comment: 24 pages, 10 figures, published in Frontiers Robotics and A

A natural fuzzyness of de Sitter space-time

A non-commutative structure for de Sitter spacetime is naturally introduced by replacing ("fuzzyfication") the classical variables of the bulk in terms of the dS analogs of the Pauli-Lubanski operators. The dimensionality of the fuzzy variables is determined by a Compton length and the commutative limit is recovered for distances much larger than the Compton distance. The choice of the Compton length determines different scenarios. In scenario I the Compton length is determined by the limiting Minkowski spacetime. A fuzzy dS in scenario I implies a lower bound (of the order of the Hubble mass) for the observed masses of all massive particles (including massive neutrinos) of spin s>0. In scenario II the Compton length is fixed in the de Sitter spacetime itself and grossly determines the number of finite elements ("pixels" or "granularity") of a de Sitter spacetime of a given curvature.Comment: 16 page

Magnetocaloric Properties of the Ni2Mn1−x(Cu,Co)xGa Heusler Alloys

We have investigated the magnetocaloric properties on the Ni2Mn1−xAxGa Heusler alloys with partial substitution of Mn by A = Co (x = 0.10, 0.20, and 0.30) and Cu (x = 0.15 and 0.20) in the vicinity of the martensitic transition by measuring magnetization curves at magnetic field up to 20 kOe and in the temperature range of 250–300 K. The changes of the magnetic part of entropy dependence on magnetic field and temperature have been evaluated

Self-Duality and the KdV Hierarchy

We derive the entire KdV hierarchy as well as the recursion relations from the self-duality condition on gauge fields in four dimensions.Comment: 7 page