Dresden 2026 – scientific programme

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TUT: Tutorien

TUT 4: Tutorium: Physics of Behavior (joint session SOE/TUT/DY)

TUT 4.1: Tutorial

Sunday, March 8, 2026, 16:00–17:00, HSZ/0004

Physics of Behavior — •Greg Stephens — Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam NL — OIST Graduate University, Tancha, JP

In these tutorials we view behavior as a complex dynamical system and we incorporate insights from dynamical systems theory and statistical physics to quantitatively capture what animals do. Of course, such theory was not historically developed to understand animal behavior, and there are particular challenges associated with the modeling of living systems. Of these, the most important is a lack of first-principles theory necessitating a data-driven approach.

In the first half of our session we will introduce two primary concepts. (1) Posture Space Analysis via Dimensionality Reduction. We explore posture space analysis by demonstrating how to decompose high-dimensional postural data into a few meaningful eigenpostures using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The dataset used comes from C. elegans posture tracking. (2) Posture Space Dynamics via State Space Reconstruction. We review the concepts of state space and chaotic systems through a toy model. We then introduce a modern data-driven technique for state space reconstruction.

Keywords: Dynamical Systems; State Space; Chaos; Principal Components Analysis