The coordination and movement of people in large crowds, during sports games or when socialising, seems readily explicable. Sometimes this occurs according to specific rules or instructions such as in a sport or game, at other times the motivations for movement may be more focused around
an individual's needs or fears. Over the last decade, the computational ability to identify and track a given individual in video footage has increased. The conventional methods of how data is gathered and interpreted in biology rely on fitting statistical results to particular models or hypotheses.
However, data from tracking movements in social groups or team sports are so complex as they cannot easily analyse the vast amounts of information and highly varied patterns. The author is an expert in human behaviour and machine learning who is based at the Graduate School of Informatics
at Nagoya University. His challenge is to bridge the gap between rule-based theoretical modelling and data-driven modelling. He is employing machine learning techniques to attempt to solve this problem, as a visiting scientist in RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project.