We are interested in understanding and engineering collective systems. We use a combination of physics and data-science approaches to (i) Understand emergence – how agent-level interactions give rise to non-obvious phenomena at the level of the collective, (ii) Engineer a collective – tune interactions or design the surroundings to make a collective behave as desired and, (iii) Infer the hidden intrinsic characteristics or the equations governing the dynamics of the collective from data. We work with several collective systems that range from droplets in a microchannel which are driven by flow, to cells that actively migrate, social organisms that collectively move to increase their chance of survival to human collectives where agents can make intelligent decisions.

• Male fertility research – inferring fertility from how sperm cells move.
• Physics informed equation learning – inferring equations governing the mechanics of collectives from data.
• Droplet engineering – digital twin for the design and operation of microfluidic devices for drug discovery.
• Indian traffic modelling – collective dynamics of heterogeneous traffic on Indian roads.

• Collective dynamics
• Organismal and cell collectives
• Traffic modelling, Agent based models
• Physics-informed data science
• Optimization techniques
• Network science approaches.

   325 KCB (previously NAC 1),
   Indian Institute Of Technology Madras,
   Email: danny@iitm.ac.in,

   Phone-No: 04422574090.