The goal of the proposed research is to create analytical and computational tools that explicitly address the time and order of social interactions between individuals. The proposed approach combines ideas from social network analysis, Internet computing, distributed computing, and machine learning to solve problems in population biology. The diverse computational tasks of this project include design of algorithmic techniques to identify social entities such as a communities, leaders, and followers, and to use these structures to predict social response patterns to danger or disturbances. Nowhere is the impact of social structure likely to be greater than when species come in contact with predators. Thus, the accuracy and predictive power of the proposed computational tools will be tested by characterizing the social structure of horses and zebras (equids) both before and after human- or predator-induced perturbations to the social network. The proposed interdisciplinary research will have broader impacts on a wide range of research communities. New methods for analysis of social interactions in animal populations will be useful for behavioral biologists in such diverse fields as behavioral ecology, animal husbandry, conservation biology, and disease ecology. The machine learning algorithms that will be develop are relevant to many studies in which researchers need to classify temporal interaction data. The proposed network methods have broader relevance to human societies: disease transmission, dissemination of ideas, and social response to crises are all dynamic processes occurring via social networks. Further, through teaching and participation in outreach, students and school teachers will gain access to opportunities for hands-on, interdisciplinary experiences in a new area of computational biology. The research and software resulting from the proposed project will be disseminated both in computational and biological communities and enhanced by cross-disciplinary training activities and will serve to train a new generation of interdisciplinary scientists.
