Benjamin Wild

• Freie Universität Berlin

Deep Convolutional Neuronal Networks (DCNN) are showing remarkable performance on many computer vision tasks. Due to their large parameter space, they require many labeled samples when trained in a supervised setting. The costs of annotating data manually can render the usage of DCNNs infeasible. We present a novel framework called RenderGAN that c...

The honeybee is a fascinating model for the emergence of collective behavior. Understanding how individual (inter-)actions of thousands of individuals that comprise a honeybee colony requires long-term tracking and identification of the animals with high accuracy. This paper proposes a software pipeline based on two deep convolutional neural networ...

Computational approaches to the analysis of collective behavior in social insects increasingly rely on motion paths as an intermediate data layer from which one can infer individual behaviors or social interactions. Honey bees are a popular model for learning and memory. Previous experience has been shown to affect and modulate future social intera...

In complex societies, individuals’ roles are reflected by interactions with other conspecifics. Honey bees (Apis mellifera) generally change tasks as they age, but developmental trajectories of individuals can vary drastically due to physiological and environmental factors. We introduce a succinct descriptor of an individual’s social network that c...

Interactions of individuals in complex social systems give rise to emergent behaviors at the group level. Identifying the functional role that individuals take in the group at a specific time facilitates understanding the dynamics of these emergent processes. An individual’s behavior at a given time can be partially inferred by common factors, such...

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) offer rich potential for clinical prediction, yet their inherent complexity and heterogeneity pose significant challenges for traditional machine learning approaches. Domain-specific EHR foundation models trained on large collections of unlabeled EHR data have demonstrated promising improvements in predictive accura...

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed a global deficiency of systematic, data-driven guidance to identify high-risk individuals. Here, we illustrate the utility of routinely recorded medical history to predict the risk for 1741 diseases across clinical specialties and support the rapid response to emerging health threats such as COVID-19. We developed a ne...

Honeybee colonies exhibit a collective circadian rhythm reflecting the periodic dynamics of the environment. Thousands of workers, including those engaged in in-hive tasks, must synchronize in various processes that may be rhythmic, such as nectar inflows, or non-rhythmic, such as brood care but it remains unknown how those different rhythms are in...

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed a global deficiency of systematic, data-driven guidance to identify high-risk individuals. Here, we illustrate the utility of routinely recorded medical history to predict the risk for 1883 diseases across clinical specialties and support the rapid response to emerging health threats such as COVID-19. We developed a ne...

Early detection of high-risk individuals is crucial for healthcare systems to cope with changing demographics and an ever-increasing patient population. Images of the retinal fundus are a non- invasive, low-cost examination routinely collected and potentially scalable beyond ophthalmology. Prior work demonstrated the potential of retinal images for...

A honey bee colony functions as an integrated collective, with individuals coordinating their behaviour to adapt and respond to unexpected disturbances. Nest homeostasis is critical for colony function; when ambient temperatures increase, individuals switch to thermoregulatory roles to cool the nest, such as fanning and water collection. While prio...

The honey bee waggle dance is one of the most prominent examples of abstract communication among animals: successful foragers convey new resource locations to interested followers via characteristic “dance” movements in the nest, where dances advertise different locations on different overlapping subregions of the “dance floor”. To this day, this s...

Survival analysis is a crucial semi-supervised task in machine learning with numerous real-world applications, particularly in healthcare. Currently, the most common approach to survival analysis is based on Cox's partial likelihood, which can be interpreted as a ranking model optimized on a lower bound of the concordance index. This relation betwe...

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed, with few exceptions, a global deficiency in delivering systematic, data-driven guidance to protect citizens and coordinate vaccination programs. At the same time, medical histories are routinely recorded in most healthcare systems and are instantly available for risk assessment. Here, we demonstrate the utility of med...

Eusocial insects operate as an integrated collective with tasks allocated among individuals. This applies also to reproduction, through coordinated mating flights between male and female reproductives. While in some species male sexuals take only a single mating flight and never return, in the Western honey bee, Apis mellifera , the male sexuals (d...

Risk stratification is critical for the early identification of high-risk individuals and disease prevention. Here we explored the potential of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy-derived metabolomic profiles to inform on multidisease risk beyond conventional clinical predictors for the onset of 24 common conditions, including metabolic,...

In honey bee colonies, workers generally change tasks with age (from brood care, to nest work, to foraging). While these trends are well-established, our understanding of how individuals distribute tasks during a day, and how individuals differ in their lifetime behavioral trajectories, is limited. Here, we use automated tracking to obtain long-ter...

Navigating animals combine multiple perceptual faculties, learn during exploration, retrieve multi-facetted memory contents, and exhibit goal-directedness as an expression of their current needs and motivations. Navigation in insects has been linked to a variety of underlying strategies such as path integration, view familiarity, visual beaconing,...

Insect colonies are decentralized systems that employ task allocation, whereby individuals undertake different roles to fulfill colony needs, such as honey bee "nurses", "nest workers", and "foragers". However, the extent to which individuals can be well-classified by discrete "roles", how they change behavior from day-to-day, over entire lifetimes...

Information transfer among foragers is key for efficient allocation of work and adaptive responses within a honey bee colony. For information to spread quickly, foragers trying to recruit nestmates via the waggle dance (dancers) must reach as many other non-dancing for-agers (followers) as possible. Forager bees may have different drives that influ...

In complex societies, individuals’ roles are reflected by interactions with other conspecifics. Honey bees (Apis mellifera) generally change tasks as they age, but developmental trajectories of individuals can vary drastically due to physiological and environmental factors. We introduce a succinct descriptor of an individual’s social network that c...

Honey bee navigation is an actively investigated field but the knowledge about the neural correlates of goal directed long distance navigation remains mostly unknown. We recorded single neuron activity during flight in a natural environment. Bees were trained to a feeder 400 m from the hive. Spiking activity of high order interneurons (mushroom bod...

The study of animal behavior increasingly relies on (semi-) automatic methods for the extraction of relevant behavioral features from video or picture data. To date, several specialized software products exist to detect and track animals' positions in simple (laboratory) environments. Tracking animals in their natural environments, however, often r...

Computational approaches to the analysis of collective behavior in social insects increasingly rely on motion paths as an intermediate data layer from which one can infer individual behaviors or social interactions. Honey bees are a popular model for learning and memory. Previous experience has been shown to affect and modulate future social intera...

The waggle dance is one of the most popular examples of animal communication. Forager bees direct their nestmates to profitable resources via a complex motor display. Essentially, the dance encodes the polar coordinates to the resource in the field. Unemployed foragers follow the dancer’s movements and then search for the advertised spots in the fi...

Representation of WRs in the data space XYT. (A) Representation of a set of 200 WRs in the XYT data space, where values in the axes X and Y are defined by their comb location, and in axis T by their time of occurrence. (B) WRs within a maximum Euclidean distance of dmax3 are clustered together and regarded as dances. (PNG)

Further details on the software modules. This document contains diagrams and detailed information on the functioning of the software modules. (PDF)

Error distributions at multiple levels of analysis. This document provides additional results supporting the case of study presented in the experimental validation and results section. (PDF)

A convolutional neural network was used to filter the detections of the AM. The raw sequences of images are processed by two stacked 3D convolution layers with SELU nonlinearities. The outputs of the second convolutional layer are flattened using average pooling on all three dimensions. A final fully connected layer with a sigmoid nonlinearity comp...

Dendrogram representing the hierarchical agglomerative clustering of 200 waggle runs. The dendrogram is a graphic representation of the clustering process. Each observation starts it its own cluster, at each iteration the two clusters closer to each other are merged, this process is performed recursively till only one cluster remains. We set a thre...

Specifications of the recording setup used during reported experiments. This document contains further information on the recording setup, with an emphasis on technical details. (PDF)

The waggle dance is one of the most popular examples of animal communication. Forager bees direct their nestmates to profitable resources via a complex motor display. Essentially, the dance encodes the polar coordinates to the resource in the field. Unemployed foragers follow the dancer's movements and then search for the advertised spots in the fi...

Deep Convolutional Neuronal Networks (DCNNs) are showing remarkable performance on many computer vision tasks. Due to their large parameter space, they require many labeled samples when trained in a supervised setting. The costs of annotating data manually can render the use of DCNNs infeasible. We present a novel framework called RenderGAN that ca...

The honeybee waggle dance communication system is an intriguing example of abstract animal communication and has been investigated thoroughly throughout the last seven decades. Typically, observables such as waggle durations or body angles are extracted manually either directly from the observation hive or from video recordings to quantify properti...

The navigation capabilities of honeybees are surprisingly complex. Experimental evidence suggests that honeybees rely on a map-like neuronal representation of the environment. Intriguingly, a honeybee brain exhibits approximately one million neurons only. In an interdisciplinary enterprise, we are investigating models of high-level processing in th...