From the invasion and proliferation of cancer cells to the dynamics of predators and prey or the spread of a disease, the quantification and analysis of individual behavior aids the understanding of heterogeneity within a group and elucidates the rules of interaction within the environment.  But at this individual perspective, one can get lost in the details.  The ability to track individuals has become easier, but modeling a heterogeneous system can be complicated and computationally expensive.  Also, the potential for analysis for such a system is limited, and there are always questions on how to aggregate the individuals and simplify the system. 

 

In observing a group, a single individual can get lost in the crowd, but the level of intricate detail from the individual is not always needed for large scale metrics of the group.  A continuum representation is usually simpler and more easily analyzed, but the loss of detail in averaging the system may compromise accuracy. 

 

How do we know which critical behaviors at the individual level contribute to the emergence of larger scale phenomena at the population level? This minisymposium will focus on individual heterogeneity and population behavior, data analysis and interpretation, and scaling methods to understand the bridging of these disjointed scales across several fields.