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Abstract:
(Invited talks)
Ant colonies, and more generally social insect societies, are
distributed systems that in spite of the simplicity of their
component individuals present a highly structured social
organization. As a result of this organization, ant colonies can
accomplish astonishingly complex tasks that could never be
performed by a single ant. The study of ant colonies behavior and
of their self-organizing capacities is interesting for computer
scientists because it provides models of distributed organization
which are useful to solve difficult optimization and distributed
control problems. This is particularly true in application
environments in which rapid and autonomous adaptation to
environmental changes, as well as robustness to system failures,
are important features. In this talk I will present some models
derived from the observation of real ants, and explain how these
models can be used to design multi-agent systems for the solution
of problems like distributed and adaptive routing in Internet-like
networks, optimal allocation of resources, and distributed task
allocation in a fleet of autonomous robots. I will conclude giving
some prospects for future applications of ant algorithms.
Marco Dorigo was born in Milan, Italy, in 1961. He received
the Ph.D. degree in information and systems electronic
engineering in 1992 from Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy, and
the title of Agrégé de l'Enseignement
Supérieur in Artificial Intelligence, from the
Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, in 1995. From 1992
to 1993 he was a research fellow at the International Computer
Science Institute of Berkeley, CA. In 1993 he was a NATO-CNR
fellow, and from 1994 to 1996 a Marie Curie fellow at the IRIDIA
lab of the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Since 1996 he
holds a tanured research position in the same lab and is a
Research Associate of the FNRS, the Belgian National Fund for
Scientific Research. His main current research interest is in ant
algorithms, a novel research area initiated by his seminal
doctoral work. Other research interests include evolutionary
computation, autonomous robotics, and reinforcement learning. He
is the author of a book on learning robots and of a book on swarm
intelligence, the editor of three books on evolutionary
computation and other modern heuristic techniques, and of more
than fifty scientific articles published in international
journals and conference proceedings. Dr. Dorigo is an Associate
Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and
Cybernetics, the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation,
the Journal of Heuristics, and the Journal of Cognitive Systems
Research. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the
Evolutionary Computation journal, the Adaptive Behavior journal,
and the Journal of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines. He
was awarded the 1996 Italian Prize for Artificial
Intelligence.
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