Marco Dorigo

Marco Dorigo (born 26 August 1961, in Milan, Italy) is a research director for the Belgian Funds for Scientific Research and a co-director of IRIDIA, the artificial intelligence lab of the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He is the proponent of the ant colony optimization metaheuristic (see his book published by MIT Press in 2004), and one of the founders of the swarm intelligence research field. Recently he got involved with research in swarm robotics: he is the coordinator of Swarm-bots: Swarms of self-assembling artefacts and of Swarmanoid: Towards humanoid robotic swarms two swarm robotics projects funded by the Future and Emerging Technologies Program of the European Commission. He is also the founding editor and editor in chief of Swarm Intelligence, the principal peer reviewed publication dedicated to reporting research and new developments in this multidisciplinary field.

For these contributions, in 2003 he was awarded the Marie Curie Research Excellence Award by the European Commission; on 22 November 2005, he was presented the Dr A. De Leeuw-Damry-Bourlart award in Applied Sciences by the King of Belgium, Albert II; in 2007 he received the Cajastur International Prize for Soft Computing, awarded by the European Centre for Soft Computing; and in 2015 he received the IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award. He is the recipient of an ERC Advanced Grant (2010).