Internal Seminar - Antonio Carlos Costa (ENS)

Abstract:
Inspired by the quantitative analysis of animal behavior, we consider a generic model in which behavior evolves in a time-dependent fluctuating potential landscape. We show that in the limit of slow and large enough fluctuations the distribution of first passage times exhibits heavy tails dominated by a power law, with corrections that depend on the strength and the nature of fluctuations. In addition, we introduce a method for inferring such time-dependent potential landscapes from videos of foraging C. elegans, extracting stereotyped behaviors as meta stable wells and slowly changing internal states through the time-dependence of the potential landscape.

We remind you that internal seminars are meant for QBio researchers to share their most recent works in an informal setting, with the aim of stimulating discussions and sharing of ideas.

Everybody interested in Antonio's talk or in discussing with him is welcome to join, even if not directly involved in the QBio collaboration.