About Me

 Research

Publications

 The AntNet page

 My thesis on ACO

 Swarm robotics @ IDSIA

 The AntHocNet page

 Teaching

 My CV

 Contacts

 Links

My Google Scholar Citations
Google Logo


Gianni Di Caro Act like a man of thought - Think like a man of action,

Thomas Mann

1 Year Postdoc Position:

Synergies between robotic swarms and ad hoc networking techniques

Deadline: September 9, 2011

 MC3 Workshop @ ICNC:

Mobility and Communication for Cooperation and Coordination,
January 30 - February 2, 2012, Maui, Hawaii. In conjuntion with ICNC 2012

Deadline: September 10, 2011

 Special issue, Elsevier Ad Hoc Networks:

Theory, Algorithms and Applications of Wireless Networked Robotics,

Deadline: October 31, 2011
EvoCOMNET 2012:

9th European Workshop on the Application of Nature-inspired Techniques for Telecommunication Networks and other Parallel and Distributed Systems, April 11-13, 2012, Malaga, Spain.

Deadline: December 7, 2011

 AAAI Video Award:

The video of the Swarmanoid project received the AAAI-2011 best video award!
IDSIA (and I) was part of the consortium

The Economist:

Article about Swarm intelligence and my research on network routing!


About me:

I obtained a degree in Physics with full honors from the University of Bologna, Italy, in 1992. Under the supervision of Prof. Marco Dorigo, I obtained in 2001 an MSc. and in 2004 a Ph.D. in Applied Sciences from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium.

I've been awarded several prestigious fellowships from the scientific institutions of the European Community and from other governmental institutions. This gave me the opportunity to work in several institutes and universities across the globe and build up an interdisciplinary expertise covering different domains such as: parallel and distributed computing, autonomous robotics, combinatorial optimization, telecommunications, swarm intelligence, artificial intelligence, and system biology. In these domains I co-authored more than 60 peer-reviewed international publications.

Currently I'm senior researcher at Istituto Dalle Molle di Studi sull'Intelligenza Artificiale (IDSIA), in Lugano, Switzerland. My current research activities focus on the study of swarm intelligence and on its application to challenging problems in communications networks, collective robotics, and combinatorial optimization.

My research activities:

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) metaheuristic:

I contributed to lay the very foundations of the ACO metaheuristic, that reverse engineers the pheromone-mediated shortest path behavior experimentally observed in ant colonies (see my thesis and publications). ACO is indeed a very popular metaheuristic that has been successfully applied to a wide range of problems, mainly in the domains of combinatorial and network optimization.

Adaptive Routing in Telecommunications Networks:

I'm the author of AntNet, one of the earliest and most representative and successful applications of the ant colony metaphor to routing problems in networks. While AntNet was meant for adaptive routing in wired IP networks, more recently I've co-authored the work of AntHocNet, in which we applied ACO ideas to routing in mesh and mobile ad hoc networks considering both open space and urban test scenarios.

Swarm Intelligence:

I'm actively involved in the general process of definition and study of this novel computational paradigm which is becoming a very popular approach for the bottom-up design of distributed systems. Swarm Intelligence finds its roots in the study of systems inspired by social behaviors in animal and insect societies. Therefore, the work derived from ant colony behaviors is at the very core of it.

Autonomous and Swarm Robotics:

In the past, I've been involved in exciting research projects concerning the definition of architectures for robotic platforms and vision-based algorithms for autonomous navigation. At the moment, I'm interested in collective and swarm robotics. My reseach focuses on the aspects of cooperation, communication, scalability, and parallelism in homogeneous and heterogeneous swarms (also including human agents).

Telecommunications Networks:

While my research on telecommunications networks has mainly focused on routing problems, I'm also very interested in many other aspects of the design and use of networks. So far, I've been involved in research activities related to the study of the effectiveness of simulation and of different simulators in telecommunications, content search in P2P networks, and in the definition of software and hardware architectures for seamless handover in heterogeneous wireless networks.

Parallel and Distributed Computing:

This was one of the earliest research domains I've been involved in. My thesis for the "Laurea" degree in physics was about the design and implementation of a parallel and distributed system for the online monitoring and control of a very large detector system for particle physics. Following work concerned the design of parallel genetic algorithms and algorithms and architectures for real-time stereo vision.

Systems Biology:

I'm fascinated by the complexity of biological systems and by their ability to successfully self-organize and adapt to dynamic environments. Following this fascination, in the past I made some work on the design and implementation of an agent-based simulator for the immune system. This work was done in collaboration with biologists and immunologists of the University of Bologna, Italy (and we were among the first to follow such an approach at that time). Also part of my more recent work on Swarm Intelligence can be also seen as related to topics of systems biology.

Contacts:
Address:
Dr. Gianni Di Caro
IDSIA
Galleria 2
6928 Manno
Switzerland
 Email: gianni at idsia dot ch

 Phone: (+41) 91 610 8671 
Fax:     (+41) 91 610 8661


Visits since March 4, 2009:
website-hit-counters.com
free search engine submission