Events

Social insects provide concrete examples of collectives enforcing system-level constraints through local behaviour even when no individual can measure the state of the whole group.

Bird flocks achieve coordinated flight through local interactions among individuals rather than a leader directing the group’s movement. In a newly listed Oxford talk, collective-behaviour researcher Steve Portugal brings together biomechanics, physiology and social interaction to explain how birds maintain cohesion, move through complex landscapes and balance aerodynamic costs against social benefits.

This funding call frames AI safety as a population-level problem involving collusion, cascading failures, emergent communication, and collective capabilities. This closes 9-August-2026.

29-Nov-2026 Hong Kong - DAI 2026 places coordination, markets, agent infrastructure, and societies of autonomous agents at the center of distributed AI research.

“Agentic AIs are a feral technology… they are projected to become a wild, self-sustaining, population.” Co-organised with Morgan Stanley, this upcoming Santa Fe Institute gathering takes place 15-Sept-2026 in NYC.

A June workshop dedicated specifically to distributed collective intelligence, including bio-inspired approaches, decentralized trust systems, artificial life concepts, and collective behavior in smart systems.

A notable June event from the Santa Fe Institute, co-sponsored by OpenAI and Google DeepMind, focused on intelligence across multiple organisational and social scales rather than intelligence as an individual phenomenon.

The accelerator targets startups explicitly using biological signalling, coordination, and adaptation principles. These programs often surface applied implementations of swarm intelligence and collective sensing before they appear in formal literature.

8-10 June 2026 in sunny Germany. ANTS solicits contributions dealing with any aspect of swarm intelligence. Typical, but not exclusive, topics of interest are: