In this talk, I will present my work on simple distributed protocols for fundamental coordination problems such as plurality and valid consensus, rumor spreading and distributed clustering in stochastic models of interaction. I will discuss applications in the research area of Biological Distributed Algorithms, which aims to understand through the algorithmic lens, the collective behavior of biological systems, such as social insects. This setting has recently motivated the study of some interesting new problems, such as the investigation of systems where communication is affected by noise in a way which cannot be handled by error correction codes.
More recently, as a fellow of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, I have been working at the interface between Theoretical Computer Science and Computational Neuroscience. I will provide a brief overview of some research topics in this direction.