Organisms have evolved sensory mechanisms to extract pertinent information from their environment, enabling them to assess their situation and act accordingly. For social organisms travelling in groups, like the fish in a school or the birds in a flock, sharing information can further improve their situational awareness and reaction times. Data on the benefits and costs of social coordination, however, have largely allowed our understanding of why collective behaviours have evolved to outpace our mechanistic knowledge of how they arise. Recent studies have begun to correct this imbalance through fine-scale analyses of group movement data. One approach that has received renewed attention is the use of information theoretic (IT) tools like mutual information , transfer entropy and causation entropy , which can help identify causal interactions in the type of complex, dynamical patterns often on display when organisms act collectively. Yet, there is a communications gap between studies focused on the ecological constraints and solutions of collective action with those demonstrating the promise of IT tools in this arena. We attempt to bridge this divide through a series of ecologically motivated examples designed to illustrate the benefits and challenges of using IT tools to extract deeper insights into the interaction patterns governing group-level dynamics. We summarize some of the approaches taken thus far to circumvent existing challenges in this area and we conclude with an optimistic, yet cautionary perspective.

We present a two-dimensional lattice model of self-propelled spins that can change direction only upon collision with another spin. We show that even with ballistic motion and minimal cooperativity, these spins display robust flocking behavior at nearly all densities, forming long bands of stripes. The structural transition in this system is not a thermodynamic phase transition, but it can still be characterized by an order parameter, and we demonstrate that if this parameter is studied as a dynamical variable rather than a steady-state observable, we can extract a detailed picture of how the flocking mechanism varies with density. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.89.012718 ©2014 American Physical Society

Adding a driven, active component to a model spin glass system leads to dramatic shifts in the phase diagram and the emergence of a reentrant glass transition.

This effort utilizes a genetically tunable system of bacteriophage to evaluate the effect of charge, temperature and particle concentration on biomaterial synthesis utilizing the coffee ring (CR) effect. There was a 1.6-3 fold suppression of the CR at higher temperatures while maintaining self-assembled structures of thin films. This suppression was observed in phage with charged and uncharged surface chemistry, which formed ordered and disordered assemblies respectively, indicating CR suppression is not dependent on short-range ordering or surface chemistry. Analysis of the drying process suggests weakened capillary flow at elevated temperatures caused CR suppression and could be further enhanced for controlled assembly for advanced biomaterials. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.