prof. dr. Marco Dorigo

Marco Dorigo is a research director for the Belgian Funds for Scientific Research (FNRS), and a co-director of IRIDIA, the artificial intelligence lab of the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He is the ambassador and the pioneer of the "Ant Colony Optimization" metaheuristic, and one of the founders of the Swarm Intelligence research field.

The Ant Colony Optimization is a probabilistic technique for solving computational problems which can be reduced to finding good paths through graphs. Marco got inspired for this by studying the behaviour of ants in finding paths from the colony to food.

The Swarm intelligence is an artificial intelligence technique based around the study of collective behavior in decentralized, self-organized systems. For these contributions, in 2003 he was awarded the "Marie Curie Research Excellence Award" by the European Commission and in 2005, he was presented the "FNRS - Dr A. De Leeuw-Damry-Bourlart award in Applied Sciences" by the King of Belgium, Albert II.

He has also received the Italian Prize for Artificial Intelligence in 1996 by the Italian association for artificial intelligence. Marco gives specialized speeches for scientific audiences and more general speeches for audiences interested in science. Marco Dorigo speeches in English, Italian and French.