Flocking birds, schooling fish, swarming bees, and other animal groups that lack centralized control can nonetheless meet real-world uncertainties with collective decision-making that is fast, flexible, adaptive, and often stunningly beautiful. This lecture will discuss Professor Leonard’s theory, which shows how these complex collective behaviors emerge from relatively simple choices individual animals make in response to their neighbors and environment. She will show further how the theory can be harnessed in science and art, such as for environmental monitoring with robotic teams and for rule-based improvisational dance. Crucially, Professor Leonard will discuss how her design and art-making experiments inform the science that motivated them. Here, art and science meet and expand one another.

The lecture will be introduced by Mario de Bernardo Professor of Automatic Control at the University of Naples Federico II. The lecture will be followed by a conversation between Naomi Ehrich Leonard and Kate Crawford.

The event will be held in English.

Speakers

Naomi Ehrich Leonard is Chair and Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. She is associated faculty with Princeton's Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics, the Graduate Program in Biophysics, and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. She is the founding director of creativeX, an interdisciplinary collective at Princeton fostering creativity and collaboration. CreativeX is where art and engineering meet in a dynamic, “rigorously undisciplined” environment.

Leonard studies and designs complex, dynamical systems comprised of many interacting agents, including, for example, animals, robots, and/or humans that move, sense, and decide together. Her research program emphasizes the development of analytically tractable mathematical models of collective dynamics that provide the systematic means to examine the role of feedback (responsive behavior), interconnection (who is communicating with whom), heterogeneity (individual differences) in the behavior, learning, and resilience of groups in changing environments.

A link to her academic publications is here: https://naomi.princeton.edu/publications/.

Mario di Bernardo (SMIEEE ’06, FIEEE 2012) is Professor of Automatic Control at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy and Visiting Professor of Nonlinear Systems and Control at the University of Bristol, U.K. He currently serves as Rector’s Delegate for Internationalization at the University of Naples Federico II and coordinates the research area and PhD program on Modeling and Engineering Risk and Complexityat the Scuola Superiore Meridionale. He is a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Control Systems Society and its Vice President for Technical Activities for the term 2025-2026. In 2007, he was awarded the title of Cavaliere of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic by the President of Italy in recognition of his scientific achievements. He was elevated to the grade of Fellow of the IEEE in January 2012 for his contributions to the analysis, control, and applications of nonlinear systems and complex networks.