CTBP Seminar: Prof. Massimo Vergassola

Learning to navigate complex environments

The talk will be in person 177 Huntington, 11th floor and lunch will be served at 12:00 on the 13th floor for anyone who emails [email protected] before COB Oct. 13.

Living systems face the challenging task of navigating complex natural environments. Notable examples include long-distance orientation using airborne olfactory cues transported by turbulent winds, the tracking of surface-bound trails of odor cues, and flight in the lowest layers of the atmosphere. Terrestrial animals, insects, and birds have evolved navigation strategies that accomplish the above tasks with an efficiency that is often yet unmatched by human technology. Indeed, robotic applications for olfactory sniffers and unmanned aerial vehicles face similar challenges for the automated location of explosives, chemical, and toxic leaks, as well as the monitoring of biodiversity, surveillance, disaster relief, cargo relief, and agriculture. I shall review the above natural phenomena, discuss how biology and physics shape and constrain navigation tasks, the role that machine learning methods can play in the field, and conclude with open issues and perspectives.

Speakers

• Massimo Vergassola, PhD

  Professor
  Ecole Normale Superieure

  Massimo Vergassola holds a joint position as Professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and Director of Research at CNRS, Paris. He was educated in Italy and France, was a postdoc at Princeton University and has held prestigious positions at French CNRS, Rockefeller University, the Pasteur Institute, UCSD, and has been a visiting scientist at Rockefeller University, KITP, IAS, LANL, Weizmann and IHES. He was Chair of the Biological Physics Division of the American Physical Society, in charge of the organization of the APS March meeting 2019 (biological physics). His scientific interests broadly cover the physics of living systems, with particular interest paid recently to the physics of embryonic development and animal behavior.