IDSIA (Istituto Dalle Molle di Studi sull'Intelligenza Artificiale) is a non-profit oriented research institute for artificial intelligence, affiliated with both the Faculty of Informatics of the University of Lugano and the Department of Innovative Technologies of SUPSI, the University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland. We focus on machine learning (artificial neural networks, reinforcement learning), optimal universal artificial intelligence and optimal rational agents, operations research, complexity theory, and robotics. IDSIA is situated near Lugano, a lakeside city in the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino, a region of Switzerland well known for its warm climate and outstanding scenery.

• in Business Week's "X-Lab Survey" IDSIA was ranked in fourth place in the category "Computer Science - Biologically Inspired", after much larger institutions. IDSIA was also ranked in the world's top 10 of the broader category "Artificial Intelligence."
• The Economist reported on IDSIA's research on Swarm Intellligence.
• Some recent achievements:
  1. San Francisco: AAAI 2011 best video award for Swarmanoid, the movie, with contributions from IDSIA, IRIDIA, EPFL, ISTC.
  2. Google Headquarters, CA: Kurzweil Prize for Best Paper of AGI 2011 (L. Gisslen, M. Luciw, V. Graziano, J. Schmidhuber)
  3. 2011 Solomonoff AGI Theory Prize shared by M. Ring, IDSIA
  4. Our team won the IJCNN 2011 on-site Traffic
  Sign Recognition Competition (the only method outperforming humans). More
  5. Singapore, MobiCONA 2011: Best research paper award (E. N. Toklu and R. Montemanni)
  6. Our team won the ICDAR 2011 Chinese handwriting recognition competition