%0 Conference Paper %B AGENTS '01 Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Autonomous Agents %D 2001 %T Automatically Tracking and Analyzing the Behavior of Live Insect Colonies %A Balch, Tucker %A Zia Khan %A Veloso, Manuela %X We introduce the study of {\it live} social insect colonies as a relevant and exciting domain for the development and application of multi-agent systems modeling tools. Social insects provide a rich source of {\it traceable} social behavior for testing multi-agent tracking, prediction and modeling algorithms. An additional benefit of this research is the potential for contributions to experimental biology --- the principled techniques developed for analyzing artificial multi-agent systems can be applied to advance the state of knowledge of insect behavior. We contribute a novel machine vision system that addresses the challenge of tracking hundreds of small animals simultaneously. Fast color-based tracking is combined with movement-based tracking to locate ants in a real-time video stream. We also introduce new methods for analyzing the spatial activity of ant colonies. The system was validated in experiments with laboratory colonies of {\it Camponotus festinatus} and several example analyses of the colonies' spatial behavior are provided. %B AGENTS '01 Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Autonomous Agents %S AGENTS '01 %I ACM %P 521 - 528 %8 2001/// %@ 1-58113-326-X %G eng %U http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/375735.376434