New Tools for Quantifying Animal Behaviors

Speaker: Chris Jernigan, animal behavior doctoral candidate

Quantifying behaviors of moving animals can be a challenging and complex task. As technology improves, our ability to fully quantify subtle changes in the behavior of animals is becoming easier but we are left with the challenge of interpreting larger and larger data sets.

Jernigan will speak briefly about some of my neurophysiological data in honey bees and how he thinks about interpreting large noisy data sets. However most of the talk will focus on discussing some of the new tools being developed in the lab of Brian Smith along with the help Justas Birgiolas, neuroscience doctoral student in the lab of Sharon Crook, to try to tackle some these long standing difficulties in quantifying animal movement. All the software being developed is freely available and we are open to new ideas and new ways to use these tools in your research.