Workshop I — Analyzing High-dimensional Traces of Intelligent Behavior

The study of biological intelligences has been transformed by breakthroughs in experimental and observational methods. New data have expanded our appreciation of the sophisticated behaviors exhibited by human and non-human animals across a range of taxa. Traces of intelligent behavior are typically high-dimensional, with complex structure in space and time. They often involve multiple data streams: for example, positional information from individual members of a bird flock, as well as “point-of-view” recordings showing what birds are looking at, moment by moment; or electrocorticographic recordings of human brain activity, as well as detailed traces of motor behavior. These traces are often buried beneath complex noise environments: individual animal movements must be pulled out of extensive visual clutter; whale song must be isolated from ocean noise. This complex, high-dimensional data requires entirely new approaches to data representation, integration, and analysis. This workshop will focus on the challenges raised by high-throughput, high-dimensional studies of intelligent behavior. It will bring together experts in animal cognition, computational neuroscience, and cognitive science with mathematicians and computer scientists focused on relevant methods in machine learning, network science, high-dimensional statistics, and information theory.

Topics: Part of the Long Program Mathematics of Intelligences