Talks

Widespread exploitation of biological resources raises concerns about the emergence of tipping points characterizing abrupt ecosystem collapse. Mitigating these tipping points is crucial for the sustainability of our being. However, our understanding of how the feedback loop between human exploitation strategies and the environment influences the mechanisms governing these tipping points remains elusive. This study employs an eco-evolutionary game-theoretic framework to explore the coupled dynamics of a renewable resource undergoing a sudden collapse. We investigate the co-evolution of strategic interactions and environmental dynamics using six possible game combinations representing diverse social dilemmas.

We find that, depending on the choice of environment-dependent payoff structure, the tipping point can be shifted or even completely eluded. Additionally, this study emphasizes the impact of monitoring and punishment mechanisms against high-effort exploitation strategists on the system’s resilience. Our results unveil a rich spectrum of dynamics, spanning from multistability to oscillation, thereby presenting formidable challenges to resource management. While addressing the tragedy of the commons resulting from heightened harvesting efforts, targeted penalties for high-effort strategists emerge as a mitigating factor. Overall, our study highlights the interplay between ecological tipping points, individual decision-making, and external control mechanisms within the realm of resource management.

The 2021 WHO Malaria Report revealed that most Sub-Saharan African countries fell short of the 2020 Global Technical Strategy (GTS) targets, largely due to inconsistent use of insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) driven by various socioeconomic factors.

This research talk leverages data from 38 SSA countries and game-theoretic models to uncover key patterns and emerging trends in malaria control. By analyzing historical data and generating optimized projections, the study identifies critical barriers—including economic constraints, behavioural resistance, and declining ITN efficacy—that contributed to these shortfalls. It also provides country-specific recommendations on the likelihood of achieving the GTS 2025 and 2030 goals.

Simulated intervention scenarios highlight actionable strategies, particularly the role of public-sector engagement in subsidizing ITN distribution to mitigate financial barriers for vulnerable populations. Additionally, using the Cobb-Douglas production model, the study demonstrates how integrated strategies can enhance donor-funded efforts and promote long-term economic sustainability within malaria elimination programs.

This talk will emphasize the necessity of aligning public health interventions with economic policies to sustain high ITN coverage and accelerate progress toward malaria eradication.

In this talk, I will describe how ideas from geometry and combinatorics can help us understand the mathematical and physical properties of cosmological integrals. From efficiently deriving canonical differential equations to a systematic method for finding a minimal basis for the physical subspace. Time permitting, I will also comment on how geometry and combinatorics control the zeros of cosmological integrands.

I will introduce how to incorporate loop contributions into positivity bounds in a massless scalar theory with shift symmetry. The allowed region of Wilson coefficients is called the EFT-hedron. With loop contributions, the n=4 null constraint, which plays an important role in determining the allowed region for g3–g4 (the Wilson coefficients of dimension-10 and dimension-12 operators, respectively), is modified. This modification of the null constraint reveals new features of the EFT-hedron. We obtained a much stronger bound for g2 (the Wilson coefficient of dimension-8 operators) without using the full unitarity condition. Furthermore, we found a negative g4, which is not possible under the tree-level bound. It would be interesting to generalize our method to more complicated theory and test our results.

All known human societies use gender to divide labor.  Extant game theoretic models in economics explain this division via appeal to rational predictions of what skill specializations will yield success in "marriage markets".  In this talk I argue that these high rationality assumptions are neither necessary nor appropriate in explaining gendered division of labor.  I use cultural evolutionary models to show how natural processes of learning and symmetry breaking predict and explain gendered division of labor.

Here we extend the Bala-Goyal framework to include differential levels of trust.  We will discuss how this modification might be used to model groups of scientists making judgments about the reliability of one another's work, and show how introducing trust dynamics can both slow learning and, in some cases, lead to stably polarized outcomes.  We will also discuss how agents learning over multiple domains can come to form epistemic factions, where unrelated beliefs become correlated.

In this general talk, we will look at the decisions that ants need to make in their day-to-day activities, by following their behaviours. Decisions in the context of stealing, learning, traffic jams and colony relocation using the model organisms Diacamma indicum a commonly found black ant in the Indian subcontinent. We will glimpse into both individual decisions and collective decisions made by these organisms. With a combination of control lab-based experiments and observations in the nature habitat we develop an understanding of the implications these decisions have on their survival and fitness.