Dario Floreano
Encyclopedia
École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne
The École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne is one of the two Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology and is located in Lausanne, Switzerland.The school was founded by the Swiss Federal Government with the stated mission to:...
in Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
. He is one of the pioneers in evolutionary robotics
Evolutionary robotics
Evolutionary robotics is a methodology that uses evolutionary computation to develop controllers for autonomous robots. Algorithms in ER frequently operate on populations of candidate controllers, initially selected from some distribution. This population is then repeatedly modified according to...
, a research field in which robot
Robot
A robot is a mechanical or virtual intelligent agent that can perform tasks automatically or with guidance, typically by remote control. In practice a robot is usually an electro-mechanical machine that is guided by computer and electronic programming. Robots can be autonomous, semi-autonomous or...
s are evolved using artificial evolution.
Floreano received an M.A.
Master of Arts (postgraduate)
A Master of Arts from the Latin Magister Artium, is a type of Master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The M.A. is usually contrasted with the M.S. or M.Sc. degrees...
in visual psychophysics
Psychophysics
Psychophysics quantitatively investigates the relationship between physical stimuli and the sensations and perceptions they effect. Psychophysics has been described as "the scientific study of the relation between stimulus and sensation" or, more completely, as "the analysis of perceptual...
from the University of Trieste
University of Trieste
The University of Trieste is a medium-sized university in Trieste in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of Italy. The university consists of 12 faculties, boasts a wide and almost complete range of university courses and currently has about 23,000 students enrolled and 1,000 professors...
in 1988, an M.Sc. in neural computation
Neural network
The term neural network was traditionally used to refer to a network or circuit of biological neurons. The modern usage of the term often refers to artificial neural networks, which are composed of artificial neurons or nodes...
from the University of Stirling
University of Stirling
The University of Stirling is a campus university founded by Royal charter in 1967, on the Airthrey Estate in Stirling, Scotland.-History and campus development:...
in 1992, and a Ph.D.
Ph.D.
A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
in cognitive systems and robotics
Robotics
Robotics is the branch of technology that deals with the design, construction, operation, structural disposition, manufacture and application of robots...
from the University of Trieste in 1995
His research activities focus on three area of embodied artificial intelligence: 1) design of novel micro-robots that take inspiration from biological organisms; 2) methods for allowing several of these robots to cooperate in order to accomplish missions that are impossible for a single robot; 3) artificial evolution to synthetize novel forms of electro-mechanical organisms and for reverse engineering of complex biological circuits, such as gene regulatory networks.
Floreano co-organized several international conferences in the fields of bio-mimetic engineering and is on the editorial board of several international journals: Neural Networks; Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines; Adaptive Behavior; Artificial Life; Connection Science; Evolutionary Computation; IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation; Autonomous Robots; Evolutionary Intelligence. He is cofounder and member of the Board of Directors of the International Society for Artificial Life, Inc., and a member of the Board of Governors of the International Society for Neural Networks.
He was also director of the popular podcast series Talking Robots, which featured interviews with high-profile professionals in robotics and artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
for an inside view on the science, technology, and business of intelligent robotics.