Keynote Speakers

Ahmed El Hady

Computational modeling of foraging behaviors. 

Keynote Summary:
Foraging is a fundamental decision-making behavior performed by all animals. Despite being a central target behavior for inquiry in neuroscience, there is still a need for a quantitative formal framework that accounts for different forms and modes of foraging behaviors. In my talk, I will present our efforts in build such a general theoretical framework beginning from the simplest analytically tractable patch foraging scenarios to more complex social foraging behaviors on a continuously varying landscape. Such a framework will provide precise hypotheses about decision making strategies employed by agents in a variety of foraging environments guiding both experimental design and data collection. I will also highlight how recent development in advanced methods for measuring behavior provides valuable high throughput data to test a variety of foraging models. 

Career:
Ahmed El Hady is a research group leader at the Center for Advanced Study of Collective behavior at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and University of Konstanz.  His research group develops theoretical and computational modeling to unravel mechanisms underlying foraging behaviors across a variety of animal species. He did his postdoctoral work at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute where he studied decision making in rats using state of the art electrophysiology and imaging techniques. He obtained his PhD in theoretical neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute of Dynamics and Self Organization (Göttingen, Germany) where he studied theoretical foundations of information processing in neural networks.