About his PhD project

Myxococcus xanthus is a bacterium capable of preying on other bacteria and self-organizing with colony members to form a wide variety of complex patterns. The motivations behind these behaviors are not well understood but seem to be linked to predation events. The aim of my thesis is to understand the individual decision-making mechanisms that could lead to the emergence of these patterns and their phase transitions. To accomplish this, I draw inspiration from machine learning algorithms used in ethology.

Keywords: Deep learning, reinforcement learning, Bayesian statistics