The advances in robotics and sensors/actuators technologies opened the way for artefacts able to interact with animals and their societies characterized by large networks of feedbacks. These artefacts introduce new feedbacks that can affect the society dynamics such as in the case of the aggregation in a patchy environment : gregarious individuals having the choice to settle on patches that are artificial agents able to communicate between themselves and to interact with the individuals through the modification of their abiotic characteristics. These self-organized systems can be modelled by the same generic models that serve to identify the behavior of the artificial agents optimizing the population management and/or leading to diverse dynamics.

Biography: Jean-Louis Deneubourg received the degree in physical chemistry and the Ph.D. degree from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Brussels, Belgium, in 1979 for his seminal work on mathematical models of animal and human behavior. He is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Nonlinear Phenomena and Complex Systems and a Professor at the Department of Animal Biology, ULB, where he teaches behavioral ecology and behavior modeling. He also works for the Belgian National Science Foundation (FNRS). Jean-Louis is an internationally recognized expert on complex systems dynamics and self-organization in collective phenomena, both in animal societies and artificial systems.