Teaching my Computer how to study Leafcutter Ants

1st Prize winner of the 2020 Imperial College PhD Showcase Competition
http://evo-biomech.ic.ac.uk/
A quick look at what I'm up to during my PhD:
Developing Deep Learning-based Computer Vision systems to study the behaviour of eusocial insects.

This short video presentation was created for the Imperial College 2020 PhD Showcase.

Abstract (adapted from ESA report):
Herbivorous Leafcutter ants form complex societies with an extreme form of task specialisation among its highly polymorphous workers. Depending on their size, these workers perform vastly different tasks within the colony. Studying this size-specific division of labour is a meticulous and error-prone task, as animals need to be either removed from the colony to be measured or their mass has to be estimated from experience, prohibiting large scale experiments with high temporal resolution. While state-of-the-art computer vision and deep learning methods have become powerful tools in behavioural studies, their potential to be used in the field is still limited and often applicable to small numbers of animals only. I, therefore, aim to develop a set of computational methods capable of (i) tracking time variable numbers of animals with high levels of occlusion in crowded areas, (ii) estimating their size, and (iii) recognising performed actions, so allowing me to perform behavioural studies at an unprecedented scale. This data analysis pipeline requires robustly trained deep neural networks, which are currently unavailable. I will overcome this limitation by generating synthetic datasets, based on high-resolution photogrammetry models. These datasets will allow me to introduce a level of variability in the training data otherwise impossible to produce. I will then use the pipeline to conduct a series of experiments, which focus on the following overarching questions: (I) How do various environmental factors influence the formation and worker size-distributions within foraging parties? (II) What is the mass-flow of plant material to the colony, and (III) What is the relationship between task choice and energy expenditure as a function of worker size?

Visuals inspired by the incredible work of Kurzgesagt - in a nutshell
   / kurzgesagt  

For more information visit our website:
http://evo-biomech.ic.ac.uk/