February 19th, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm in DCH 3092
Speaker: Lisa O’Bryan (PSYC/ECE)
Please indicate interest, especially if you want lunch, here.
Abstract:
My research focuses on the critical role communication plays in the successful functioning of social groups, with attention to how communication patterns impact, and are impacted by, individual and group-level properties. I study this topic through the development of technology that can obtain detailed, time-varying measurements of individual behaviors and interactions. In this talk I will review my work using both tracking collars to study how vocalizations influence the collective movements of domesticated herds and wild baboons and 360 degree cameras to study the role conversational turn-taking plays in the decision-making and collective intelligence of human teams. Throughout the talk I will highlight the role machine learning plays in the processing of these high-resolution data. The long-term goal of my research program is to gain new insights into the evolution of communication systems and how we can engineer communication systems within our own societies to produce more favorable group-wide outcomes.