Because of its responsiveness to changes in the marine environment, it has been suggested by Rose in 2005 that the capelin, a small pelagic fish that is key to the ecology and fisheries of the North Atlantic, could be seen as a “canary in the coalmine” to detect signals of changes in the Arctic Ocean. We will describe the historical data that make possible a quantitative assessment of the geographical shift capelin migration-paths and spawning grounds undergo with increasing temperature, and the time it takes to make these shifts long-lasting. Then we introduce recent data that make these quantitativemeasurements more accurate and predictive. The Copernicus database of the European Union is used to examine the evolution of the returning Atlantic water (from Svalbard) that is forming a warmer and saltier boundary current under the colder and fresher East Greenland polar current. The returning Atlantic water has a temperature range (1 to 4 degrees Centigrade) suitable for feeding migrations of the capelin. This current is reaching further north along the coast of North East Greenland and we use Copernicus to simulate this evolution. We then validate the Copernicus data with measurements made in the fall expeditions of the Marine and Freshwater Research Institute, in Iceland, along the East Coast of Greenland. We identify trends in Copernicus data showing that the returning Atlantic water boundary current may reach the major glacier streams draining a large portion of the Greenland Glacier, in the relatively near future, and use the capelin data to predict when this may happen.@en

We develop an agent-based model on a lattice to investigate territorial development motivated by markings such as graffiti, generalizing a previously-published model to account for K groups instead of two groups. We then analyze this model and present two novel variations. Our model assumes that agents’ movement is a biased random walk away from rival groups’ markings. All interactions between agents are indirect, mediated through the markings. We numerically demonstrate that in a system of three groups, the groups segregate in certain parameter regimes. Starting from the discrete model, we formally derive the continuum system of 2K convection– diffusion equations for our model. These equations exhibit cross-diffusion due to the avoidance of the rival groups’ markings. Both through numerical simulations and through a linear stability analysis of the continuum system, we find that many of the same properties hold for the K-group model as for the two-group model. We then introduce two novel variations of the agent-based model, one corresponding to some groups being more timid than others, and the other corresponding to some groups being more threatening than others. These variations present different territorial patterns than those found in the original model. We derive corresponding systems of convection– diffusion equations for each of these variations, finding both numerically and through linear stability analysis that each variation exhibits a phase transition.

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We study a two-species cross-diffusion model that is inspired by a system of convectiondiffusion equations derived from an agent-based model on a two-dimensional discrete lattice. The latter model has been proposed to simulate gang territorial development through the use of graffiti markings. We find two energy functionals for the system that allow us to prove a weak-stability result and identify equilibrium solutions. We show that under the natural definition of weak solutions, obtained from the weak-stability result, the system does not allow segregated solutions. Moreover, we present a result on the long-term behavior of solutions in the case when the masses of the densities are smaller than a critical value. This result is complemented with numerical experiments.

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We study distributional solutions to the radially symmetric aggregation equation for power-law potentials. We show that distributions containing spherical shells form part of a basin of attraction in the space of solutions in the sense of “shifting stability." For spherical shell initial data, we prove the exponential convergence of solutions to equilibrium and construct some explicit solutions for specific ranges of attractive power. We further explore results concerning the evolution and equilibria for initial data formed from convex combinations of spherical shells.@en

We consider a collective behavior model in which individuals try to imitate each others' velocity and have a preferred speed. We show that a phase change phenomenon takes place as diffusion decreases, bringing the system from a "disordered" to an "ordered" state. This effect is related to recently noticed phenomena for the diffusive Vicsek model. We also carry out numerical simulations of the system and give further details on the phase transition.

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We consider a hydrodynamic model of swarming behavior derived from the kinetic description of a particle system combining a noisy Cucker-Smale consensus force and self-propulsion. In the large self-propulsive force limit, we provide evidence of a phase transition from disordered to ordered motion which manifests itself as a change of type of the limit model (from hyperbolic to diffusive) at the crossing of a critical noise intensity. In the hyperbolic regime, the resulting model, referred to as the 'Self-Organized Hydrodynamics (SOH)', consists of a system of compressible Euler equations with a speed constraint. We show that the range of SOH models obtained by this limit is restricted. To waive this restriction, we compute the Navier-Stokes diffusive corrections to the hydrodynamic model. Adding these diffusive corrections, the limit of a large propulsive force yields unrestricted SOH models and offers an alternative to the derivation of the SOH using kinetic models with speed constraints.

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We study the well-known sociological phenomenon of gang aggregation and territory formation through an interacting agent system defined on a lattice. We introduce a two-gang Hamiltonian model where agents have red or blue affiliation but are otherwise indistinguishable. In this model, all interactions are indirect and occur only via graffiti markings, on-site as well as on nearest neighbor locations. We also allow for gang proliferation and graffiti suppression. Within the context of this model, we show that gang clustering and territory formation may arise under specific parameter choices and that a phase transition may occur between well-mixed, possibly dilute configurations and well separated, clustered ones. Using methods from statistical mechanics, we study the phase transition between these two qualitatively different scenarios. In the mean-fields rendition of this model, we identify parameter regimes where the transition is first or second order. In all cases, we have found that the transitions are a consequence solely of the gang to graffiti couplings, implying that direct gang to gang interactions are not strictly necessary for gang territory formation; in particular, graffiti may be the sole driving force behind gang clustering. We further discuss possible sociological - as well as ecological - ramifications of our results.@en

In this paper we introduce simplified, exact, combinatorial formulas that arise in the vortex interaction model found in [33]. These combinatorial formulas allow for the efficient implementation and development of a new multi-moment vortex method (MMVM) using a Hermite expansion to simulate 2D vorticity. The method naturally allows the particles to deform and become highly anisotropic as they evolve without the added cost of computing the non-local Biot-Savart integral. We present three examples using MMVM. We first focus our attention on the implementation of a single particle, large number of Hermite moments case, in the context of quadrupole perturbations of the Lamb-Oseen vortex. At smaller perturbation values, we show the method captures the shear diffusion mechanism and the rapid relaxation (on Re^1/3 time scale) to an axisymmetric state. We then present two more examples of the full multi-moment vortex method and discuss the results in the context of classic vortex methods. We perform numerical tests of convergence of the single particle method and show that at least in simple cases the method exhibits the exponential convergence typical of spectral methods. Lastly, we numerically investigate the spatial accuracy improvement from the inclusion of higher Hermite moments in the full MMVM.

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We propose an agent-based model to simulate the creation of street gang rivalries. The movement dynamics of agents are coupled to an evolving network of gang rivalries, which is determined by previous interactions among agents in the system. Basic gang data, geographic information, and behavioral dynamics suggested by the criminology literature are integrated into the model. The major highways, rivers, and the locations of gangs' centers of activity influence the agents' motion. We use a policing division of the Los Angeles Police Department as a case study to test our model. We apply common metrics from graph theory to analyze our model, comparing networks produced by our simulations and an instance of a Geographical Threshold Graph to the existing network from the criminology literature.@en

In this paper, we study simulations of the schooling and swarming behavior of a mathematical model for the motion of pelagic fish. We use a derivative of a discrete model of interacting particles originated by Vicsek and Czirók et al. [A. Czirók, T. Vicsek, Collective behavior of interacting self-propelled particles, Physica A 281 (2000) 17-29; A. Czirók, H. Stanley, T. Vicsek, Spontaneously ordered motion of self-propelled particles, Journal of Physics A: Mathematical General 30 (1997) 1375-1385; T. Vicsek, A. Czirók, E. Ben-Jacob, I. Cohen, O. Shochet, Novel type of phase transition in a system of self-driven particles, Physical Review Letters 75 (6) (1995) 1226-1229; T. Vicsek, A. Czirók, I. Farkas, D. Helbing, Application of statistical mechanics to collective motion in biology, Physica A 274 (1999) 182-189]. Recently, a system of ODEs was derived from this model [B. Birnir, An ODE model of the motion of pelagic fish, Journal of Statistical Physics 128 (1/2) (2007) 535-568], and using these ODEs, we find transitory and long-term behavior of the discrete system. In particular, we numerically find stationary, migratory, and circling behavior in both the discrete and the ODE model and two types of swarming behavior in the discrete model. The migratory solutions are numerically stable and the circling solutions are metastable. We find a stable circulating ring solution of the discrete system where the fish travel in opposite directions within an annulus. We also find the origin of noise-driven swarming when repulsion and attraction are absent and the fish interact solely via orientation.@en

We present a shape-based approach to three-dimensional image reconstruction from diffuse optical data. Our approach differs from others in the literature in that we jointly reconstruct object and background characterization and localization simultaneously, rather than sequentially process for optical properties and postprocess for edges. The key to the efficiency and robustness of our algorithm is in the model we propose for the optical properties of the background and anomaly: We use a low-order parameterization of the background and another for the interior of the anomaly, and we use an ellipsoid to describe the boundary of the anomaly. This model has the effect of regularizing the inversion problem and provides a natural means of including additional physical properties if they are known a priori. A Gauss– Newton-type algorithm with line search is implemented to solve the underlying nonlinear least–squares problem and thereby determine the coefficients of the parameterizations and the descriptors of the ellipsoid. Numerical results show the effectiveness of this method.@en