Collective phenomena research @CoPhe Lab  
Department of Applied Mechanics and Biomedical Engg. (AMBE), IIT Madras
(CoPhe pronounced as coffee; short for collective phenomena)

We are interested in the nonlinear interactions and group level dynamics of collective systems (which are made up of several interacting entities/agents). We study a variety of systems that range from droplets in a microchannel to cells that migrate as a group, collective movement exhibited by social animals for survival to human traffic systems where agents are capable of making intelligent decisions. We use a combination of physics & data-driven approaches to study broad questions that surround the mechanics of these finite collectives. For instance, we are interested in the phenomenon of emergence: how group level behaviour emerge from interactions that are local to the agents. We like to work on inverse problems where we want to engineer the collective, i.e. tune the agent-interactions or design the surroundings, to make the collective behave as desired. We are also interested in inference problems where we derive the equations governing the dynamics of the collective from real data or develop frameworks to infer the hidden characteristics of agents from movement data. READ MORE