Studies on herding and self-organization in economics and the social and biological sciences have observed that coordination among multiple agents leads to regular patterns of behavior and swarm intelligence, even when each group member shows limited behavioral complexity. In ant colonies, for example, individual ants cannot capture rich spatial information from their environment because of their limited sensing ability. Nevertheless, when the ants coordinate their activities within a colony, the group ends up exhibiting better sensing abilities. Using signal processing and communications techniques, the research studies how and why such manifestations of rational and organized behavior arise at the group level from local interactions among agents with limited abilities, what communication topologies enable such behavior, and what type of signal processing enables such formations.
This research seeks to understand and reverse-engineer the distributed intelligence encountered in socio-economic-biological networks, by investigating relations with learning and rationality over cognitive networks. The latter are adaptive networks that avoid centralized information processing and perform in-network inference and control decisions. Cognitive networks contrast with networks that rely on centralized and parallel information fusion, which are not scalable, are hard to adapt to changing topologies, and suffer from points of vulnerability and information bottlenecks. The research considers large scale networks of agents and studies how global (rational or irrational) patterns of behavior emerge, including herds, contagions and bubbles in economics. An understanding of how the biotic environment influences collective behavior in animal societies provides a real world guide to good cognitive networks, which can be used in turn to design engineered systems. Cognitive networks have applications in areas ranging from precision agriculture, to environmental monitoring, disaster relief management, and smart spaces.
