I joined the University of Sheffield on October 1st 2010. Previously I was in the Department of Computer Science, University of Bristol. This is a temporary website, based on my old Bristol homepage, which I plan to upgrade in due course. Links may currently take you to old pages at the Department of Computer Science, University of Bristol.
Please visit the new lab pages for the Behavioural and Evolutionary Theory lab for more up-to-date information.
Research Interests: Biologically-Inspired Algorithms, Cognitive Behaviour, Complex Adaptive Systems, Decision Theory, Evolutionary Theory, Mathematical Biology, Social Insect Behaviour
Research Projects
Previous research projects:
Research Activities
- Academic Editor - PLoS ONE I am a member of the editorial board for PLoS ONE
- EPSRC Peer Review College Member - April 2010 to March 2014
- Proposal Reviewer - EPSRC, ESRC, BBSRC, NSF, Royal Society, McDonnell Foundation
- Paper Reviewer - (invitations from over 20 journals including) American Naturalist, Behavioral Ecology, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, Current Biology, Ecology Letters, Journal of Animal Ecology, Journal of Theoretical Biology, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS one, Physica A, Proceedings of the Royal Society Series B, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, Science, Theoretical Population Biology, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, ...
International Invited Talks
- Optimal Collective Decision-Making in Honeybees: Novel Insights for Psychology and Neuroscience? 14th September 2011. Department of Psychology, Princeton University.
- Ultimate Causes and the Evolution of Altruism. August 11th 2011. Theory of Cooperation Workshop. Adelboden (University of Bern).
- Optimal Voting in Groups with Convergent Interests. March 21st 2011. AAAI Spring Symposium. Stanford University.
- Optimality Theory in Collective Behaviour. March 17th 2011. Insect Self-Organization and Swarming Meeting. Mathematical Biosciences Institute, Ohio State University.
- Colony-Level Cognition: Optimal Decisions, Brains, and Social Insect Colonies. July 29th 2009. 'Swarm Cognition' workshop at CogSci 2009, Amsterdam.
- Optimal Decision-Making in Brains and Social Insect Colonies. June 20th 2008. Systems Biology of Decision-Making Meeting. Mathematical Biosciences Institute, Ohio State University.
- Optimal Decision-Making in Brains and Social Insect Colonies. May 20th 2008. Principles of Biological Computation Meeting. Santa Fe Institute.
- Whys and Wherefores of Computer Modelling in Behavioural Biology. 10th July 2004. Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, Vienna.
Selected Publications
Journal and Preprints
- Trimmer, P. C., McNamara, J. M., Houston, A. I. & Marshall, J. A. R. (2012) Does natural-selection favour the Rescorla-Wagner rule? Journal of Theoretical Biology (in press)
- Franklin, E., Robinson, E. J. H., Marshall, J. A. R., Sendova-Franks, A. & Franks, N. R. (2012) Do ants need to be old and experienced to teach? Journal of Experimental Biology (in press)
- Seeley, T. D, Visscher, P. K., Schlegel, T., Hogan, P. M., Franks, N. R. & Marshall, J. A. R. (2012) Stop signals provide cross inhibition in collective decision making by honeybee swarms. Science (in press) [PDF]
- Marshall, J. A. R. (2011) Group selection and kin selection: formally equivalent approaches. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 26, 325-332 [PDF]
- Robinson, E. J. H., Franks, N. R. & Marshall, J. A. R. (2011) A simple threshold rule is sufficient to explain sophisticated collective decision making. PLoS ONE [PDF]
- Abbott, P. et al. (2011) Inclusive fitness theory and eusociality. Nature 471, E1-E4 [PDF]
- Trimmer, P.C., Houston, A.I., Marshall, J.A.R., Mendl, M.T., Paul, E.S. & McNamara, J.M. (2011) Decision-making under uncertainty: biases and Bayesians. Animal Cognition (in press)
- Stroeymeyt, N., Robinson, E.J.H., Hogan, P.M., Marshall, J.A.R., Giurfa, M. & Franks, N.R. (2010) Experience-dependent flexibility in collective decision-making by house-hunting ants. Behavioral Ecology (in press)
- Trianni, V., Tuci, L., Passino, K.M. & Marshall, J.A.R. (2010) Swarm cognition: an interdisciplinary approach to the study of self-organising biological collectives. Swarm Intelligence [PDF]
- Marshall, J. A. R., McNamara, J. M. & Houston, A. I. (2010) The state of Darwinian theory. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology [PDF]
- McNamara, J. M., Trimmer, P. C., Eriksson, A., Marshall, J. A. R. & Houston, A. I. (2010) Environmental variability can select for optimism or pessimism. Ecology Letters [PDF]
- Marshall, J. A. R. (2010) Ultimate causes and the evolution of altruism. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology [PDF]
- Marshall, J. A. R. (2010) Queller's rule OK: comment on van Veelen 'when inclusive fitness is right and when it can be wrong'. Journal of Theoretical Biology (in press) [PDF]
- Marshall, J. A. R. (2009) The donation game with roles played between relatives. Journal of Theoretical Biology 260, 386-391 [PDF]
- Marshall, J. A. R. & Franks, N. R. (2009) Colony-level cognition. Current Biology 19, R395-R396 [PDF]
- Marshall, J. A. R., Bogacz, R., Dornhaus, A. Planqué, R., Kovacs, T. & Franks, N. R. (2009) On optimal decision making in brains and social insect colonies. Journal of the Royal Society: Interface 6, 1065-1074 [PDF]
- Trimmer, P., Bogacz, R., Houston, A. I., Marshall, J. A. R., McNamara, J. M., Mendl, M., Paul, E. (2008) Mammalian choices: combining fast-but-innacurate and slow-but-accurate decision-making systems. Proceedings of the Royal Society Series B: Biological Sciences 275, 2353-2361 [PDF]
- Franks, N. R., Hooper, J. W., Gumn, M., Bridger, T. H., Marshall, J. A. R., Gross, R. & Dornhaus, A. (2007) Moving targets: collective decisions and flexible choices in house-hunting ants. Swarm Intelligence 2, 81-94 [PDF]
- Planqué, R., Dechaume-Moncharmont, F. X., Franks, N. R., Kovacs, T. & Marshall, J. A. R. (2007) Why do house-hunting ants recruit in both directions? Naturwissenschaften 94, 1028-1042 [PDF]
- Planqué, R., Dornhaus, A., Franks, N. R., Kovacs, T. & Marshall, J. A. R. (2007) Weighting waiting in collective decision-making. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 61, 347-356 [PDF]
- Marshall, J. A. R., Dornhaus, A., Franks, N. R. & Kovacs, T. (2006) Noise, cost and speed-accuracy trade-offs: decision making in a decentralized system. Journal of the Royal Society: Interface 3, 243-254 [PDF]
- Marshall, J. A. R. & Rowe, J. E. (2003) Viscous populations and their support for reciprocal cooperation. Artificial Life 9, 327-334 [PDF]
- Marshall, J. A. R. & Rowe, J. E. (2003) Kin selection may inhibit the evolution of reciprocation. Journal of Theoretical Biology 222, 331-335 [PDF]
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Conference
- Marshall, J. A. R. (2011) Optimal voting in groups with convergent interests. In: AAAI Spring Symposium Series [PDF]
- Marshall, J. A. R. & Hinton, T. G. (2010) Beyond no free lunch: realistic algorithms for arbitrary problem classes. In: Proceedings of IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2010, 1319-1324. [PDF]
- Edakunni, N., Kovacs, T., Brown, G. & Marshall, J. A. R. (2009) Modelling UCS as a mixture of experts. In: Proceedings of GECCO'09, 1187-1194. ACM Press [PDF]
- Marshall, J. A. R., Brown, G. & Kovacs, T. (2007) Bayesian estimation of rule accuracy in UCS. In: Proceedings of the 2007 GECCO Conference Companion on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, 2831-2834. ACM Press
- Brown, G, Kovacs, T. & Marshall, J. A. R. (2007) UCSpv: Principled voting in UCS rule populations. In: H. Lipson et al. (eds.) Proceedings of GECCO'07 (vol. 2), 1774-1781. ACM Press
- Marshall, J. A. R., Kovacs, T. (2006) A representational ecology for learning classifier systems. In: M. Keijzer et al. (eds.) Proceedings of GECCO'06 (vol. 2), 1529-1536. ACM Press
- Marshall, J. A. R. (2005) Collective action selection in social insect colonies. In: Bryson et al. (eds.) Modelling Natural Action Selection: Proceedings of an International Workshop, 143-145. AISB Press
- Cayzer, S., Smith, J., Marshall, J. A. R. & Kovacs, T. (2005) What have gene libraries done for AIS? In: C. Jacob et al. (eds.) ICARIS 2005: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Artificial Immune Systems, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3627, 86-99
- Marshall, J. A. R. & Tokumine, S. (2004) See how she runs: towards visualising artificial red queen evolution. In: J. Pollack et al. (eds.) Artificial Life IX: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference, 334-339. MIT Press [PDF]
- Marshall, J. A. R., Kovacs, T., Dornhaus, A. R. & Franks, N. R. (2003) Simulating the evolution of ant behaviour in evaluating nest sites. In: W. Banzhaf et al. (eds.) Advances in Artificial Life - Proceedings of the Seventh European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL 2003), Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 2801, 643-650. Springer Verlag [PDF]
- Marshall, J. A. R. & Rowe, J. E. (2000) Investigating the mechanisms underlying cooperation in viscous population multi-agent systems. In: M. Bedau et al. (eds.) Artificial Life VII: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference, 348-352. MIT Press [PDF (updated from proceedings version)]
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Book Chapters
- Marshall, J. A. R., Bogacz, R., Planqué, R., Kovacs, T. & Franks, N. R. (2011) On optimal decision making in brains and social insect colonies. In: Seth et al. (eds.) Modelling Natural Action Selection. Cambridge University Press (in press).
- Franks, N. R., Dornhaus, A., Marshall, J. A. R. & Dechaume-Moncharmont, F. X. (2009) The dawn of a golden age in mathematical insect sociobiology. In: Gadau and Fewell (eds.) Organization of Insect Societies. Harvard University Press.
- Marshall, J. A. R. & Franks, N. R. (2007) Computer modelling in behavioral and evolutionary ecology: whys and wherefores. In: Laubichler and Müller (eds.) Modelling Biology - Structures, Behaviors, Evolution. Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology, MIT Press.
Reviews
- Marshall, J. A. R. (2004) Review of "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory" by S. J. Gould. Artificial Life 10: 1, 113-115 [PDF]
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Books and Edited Collections
- Mathematical Models in Ecology and Evolution: Darwin 200. Marshall, J. A. R., McNamara, J.M. & Houston, A. I. (eds.) Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 65: 3 [TOC]
- Proceedings of AISB'06: Adaptation in Artificial and Biological Systems (vols. 1, 2 and 3). Kovacs, T. & Marshall, J. A. R. (eds). SSAISB, 2006. [PDF] [PDF] [PDF]
Thesis
- Marshall, J. A. R. (2002) An Investigation into Kin Selection and Reciprocal Cooperation in a Viscous Population [PS.GZ]
Research Collaborators
My main scientific collaborations are currently with
- Nigel Franks, School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol
- John McNamara, Department of Mathematics, University of Bristol
- Alasdair Houston, School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol
- Tom Seeley, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, Cornell University
- Kirk Visscher, College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences, University of California Riverside
- Mike Mendl, Department of Clinical Veterinary Science, University of Bristol
- Liz Paul, Department of Clinical Veterinary Science, University of Bristol
Trivia
- My Hamilton number is 2 (Marshall, J.A.R. -> Houston, A.I. -> Hamilton, W.D.)
- My Erdos number is no more than 4 (Marshall, J.A.R. -> Rowe, J.E. -> Dietzfelbinger, M. -> Alon, N. -> Erdős, P.)
- I received a copy of 'Being or Nothingness' by 'Joe K' (see 'The Psychopath Test' by Ron Johnson)
Software
Teaching
I will teach on the following courses for 2011/12:
Bookmarks
James Marshall,
Last modified on May 9th 2012
