Computation Tools to Analyze Wild Animal Behavior (4/23/2008)

Tracking devices such as tiny sensors and GPS along with advanced laboratory genetic tools and techniques often give biologists more information than they can handle.

Tanya Berger-Wolf, assistant professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, hopes to develop computational tools to make better sense of this data. To help her in this effort, she's been awarded a five-year, $505,000 National Science Foundation Career Award.

Berger-Wolf's work under the new award will blend with her existing projects with other computer scientists and population biologists. They plan to use computers to better understand animal behavior and put the information to work for animal conservation.

"We have this explosion of data that's coming at biologists at incredible speed," Berger-Wolf said. In the past the ways biologists studied populations relied on different types and amounts of data, so the statistical methodology was developed for data "at a very different scale," she said.

Berger-Wolf's current projects involve developing computational methods to identify kinship relationships among wild animal populations and to study social networks.

"We're trying to infer patterns of social interactions, individuals that are important in one way or another, how the structure of social networks changes around the important individuals, or when they become important, transitions, stable interactions, communities and so on," she said.

The Career award builds on both of these projects and has the goal of developing computational tools to simultaneously analyze genetic data along with social patterns tracked by GPS sensors.

"The focus of the project is to develop tools to allow us to answer questions about how relationships in the genetic network affect relationships in this social network and vice versa," she said.

"We're just learning how to answer these real-world questions with computational approaches."

Most of the funding will support graduate students helping Berger-Wolf in her research. Part of the award will be used to promote computer science as a career among females and minorities.

NSF's Faculty Early Career Development award is its most prestigious honor given to junior faculty members in the sciences and engineering who have shown a demonstrated commitment to research and engineering.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by the University of Illinois at Chicago

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