"You could call me a prototypical modern European researcher," says Dorigo with hindsight. Born in Italy, where he was awarded a doctorate in electronic engineering, he has pursued a career that has taken him to Germany, Switzerland and the United States. "Today I live and work in Belgium, where I am a professor in artificial intelligence at the Applied Sciences Faculty of the Université Libre de Bruxelles."
His eligibility for the Marie Curie Award stemmed from a European Union mobility grant, a two-year fellowship, from which he benefited as a young researcher. Over 35,000 European researchers have received such grants, which help to increase their experience and language skills. "I am delighted with this award and see it as recognition for a combination of things," he adds, "especially my career to date, the results of my research - which is mainly funded by European R&D programmes - and its scientific value."
The award mentions Dorigo's research into 'ant colony optimisation and ant algorithms', which he has been studying for 15 years. Part of this work is being exploited in the ongoing IST-Future and Emerging Technologies project bots.org/">Swarm-bots, which he coordinates. The project aims to demonstrate that robots can mimic some of the self-organising and self-assembling behaviour of social insects. "Ants are simple beings, but when foraging they present complex structures which inspire interesting solutions in this field."
"We already have two prototypes of these little robots we call Swarm-bots and hope to have made 30 by the end of 2003," says Dorigo. These robots can link up in various ways to accomplish tasks that a single robot could not, such as crossing a gap or climbing stairs. Their robustness and flexibility, implemented through hardware and software developments, is very promising.
"Robots like these could usefully work in disaster situations or in space environments," believes Dorigo. His own lab, IRIDIA, where he is research director, is focusing on 'swarm intelligence' research for this project. This includes solving optimisation problems for control systems through study of social insects, as well as the use and development of neural networks.
The busy professor is also coordinator of the Metaheuristics Network, a Marie Curie Research Training Network.
Contact:Prof. Marco Dorigo
IRIDIA
Institut de Recherches Interdisciplinaires et de Développements en Intelligence Artificielle
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Belgium
Tel: +32-2-6503169
Fax: +32-2-6502715
Email: mdorigo@ulb.ac.be
Source: Based on information from Swarm-bots, Iridia and Marie Curie Actions
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