Computational Behavioral Ecology
Tanya Berger-Wolf
University of Illinois - Chicago
Date and Location: Tuesday, April 2nd,
2013, 12:45pm - 1:45pm @ Stuart Building, Room 111.
Abstract
Behavioral ecology is the study of the ecological and
evolutionary basis for animal behavior. Recent advances in data
collection technology, such as GPS and other mobile sensors, high
definition cameras, satellite images, and genotyping, have brought
this field (and many other areas of field biology) into the era of
big data. Such data offer the promise of answering some of the big
questions about why animals do what they do, among other things.
Unfortunately, in the domain of behavioral ecology and population
dynamics, our ability to analyze data lags substantially behind our
ability to collect it. In this talk I will show how computational
approaches can be part of every stage of the scientific process of
understanding animal sociality, from data collection (identifying
individual animals from photographs by stripes and spots) to
hypothesis formulation (by designing a novel computational framework
for analysis of dynamic social networks).
Biography
Dr. Tanya Berger-Wolf is an Associate Professor in the Department of
Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago where she
heads the Computational Population Biology Lab. Her research
interests are in applications of computational techniques to
problems in population biology of plants, animals, and humans, from
genetics to social interactions. Dr. Berger-Wolf has received her
Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign in 2002. She spent some time as a postdoctoral
fellow at the University of New Mexico working in computational
phylogenetics and at the Center for Discrete Mathematics and
Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS) doing research in
computational epidemiology. She has received numerous awards for her
research and mentoring, including the US National Science Foundation
CAREER Award in 2008 and the UIC Mentor of the Year (2009) and
Graduate Mentor (2012) awards.