The Swiss institute for 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...

 IDSIA (Istituto Dalle Molle di Studi sull'Intelligenza Artificiale) was founded in 1988 by the private Dalle Molle foundation. In 2000 it became a public research institute

Research institute

A research institute is an establishment endowed for doing research. Research institutes may specialize in basic research or may be oriented to applied research...

, affiliated with the University of Lugano

Lugano

Lugano is a city of inhabitants in the city proper and a total of over 145,000 people in the agglomeration/city region, in the south of Switzerland, in the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino, which borders Italy...

 and SUPSI in Ticino

Ticino

Canton Ticino or Ticino is the southernmost canton of Switzerland. Named after the Ticino river, it is the only canton in which Italian is the sole official language...

, 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....

.

One of the main research themes at IDSIA are the Artificial Ants

Artificial Ants

In computer science, Artificial Ants stand for multi-agent methods inspired by the behavior of real ants. The pheromone-based communication of biological ants is often the predominant paradigm used. Combinations of Artificial Ants and local search algorithms have become a method of choice for...

, which are multi-agent methods inspired by the pheromone

Pheromone

A pheromone is a secreted or excreted chemical factor that triggers a social response in members of the same species. Pheromones are chemicals capable of acting outside the body of the secreting individual to impact the behavior of the receiving individual...

-based communication of biological ants, pioneered by former IDSIA senior researcher Marco Dorigo

Marco Dorigo

Marco Dorigo is a research director for the Belgian Funds for Scientific Research , a professor in the computer science department of the University of Paderborn and a co-director of , the artificial intelligence lab of the Université Libre de Bruxelles.He is the proponent of the "ant colony...

 and IDSIA's co-director (since 1995) Luca Maria Gambardella

Luca Maria Gambardella

Luca Maria Gambardella has been co-director of the Swiss AI lab IDSIA since 1995. Together with former IDSIA senior researcher Marco Dorigo and others he made substantial contributions to the rapidly growing research field of ant colony optimization, a set of multi-agent methods inspired by the...

. IDSIA's combinations of Artificial Ants and local search

Local search (optimization)

In computer science, local search is a metaheuristic method for solving computationally hard optimization problems. Local search can be used on problems that can be formulated as finding a solution maximizing a criterion among a number of candidate solutions...

 algorithms have become a method of choice for numerous optimization

Optimization (mathematics)

In mathematics, computational science, or management science, mathematical optimization refers to the selection of a best element from some set of available alternatives....

 tasks involving some sort of graph

Graph (mathematics)

In mathematics, a graph is an abstract representation of a set of objects where some pairs of the objects are connected by links. The interconnected objects are represented by mathematical abstractions called vertices, and the links that connect some pairs of vertices are called edges...

, such as vehicle routing

Vehicle routing problem

The vehicle routing problem is a combinatorial optimization and integer programming problem seeking to service a number of customers with a fleet of vehicles. Proposed by Dantzig and Ramser in 1959, VRP is an important problem in the fields of transportation, distribution and logistics...

 and internet routing

Routing

Routing is the process of selecting paths in a network along which to send network traffic. Routing is performed for many kinds of networks, including the telephone network , electronic data networks , and transportation networks...

. The burgeoning activity in this field has led to numerous commercial

Commerce

While business refers to the value-creating activities of an organization for profit, commerce means the whole system of an economy that constitutes an environment for business. The system includes legal, economic, political, social, cultural, and technological systems that are in operation in any...

 applications and specialized conferences dedicated to Artificial Ants.

Other major research topics in the group of IDSIA's co-director Juergen Schmidhuber (since 1995) include machine learning

Machine learning

Machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, is a scientific discipline concerned with the design and development of algorithms that allow computers to evolve behaviors based on empirical data, such as from sensor data or databases...

 algorithms for brain

Brain

The brain is the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals—only a few primitive invertebrates such as sponges, jellyfish, sea squirts and starfishes do not have one. It is located in the head, usually close to primary sensory apparatus such as vision, hearing,...

-inspired artificial recurrent neural networks

Neural Networks

Neural Networks is the official journal of the three oldest societies dedicated to research in neural networks: International Neural Network Society, European Neural Network Society and Japanese Neural Network Society, published by Elsevier...

, reinforcement learning

Reinforcement learning

Inspired by behaviorist psychology, reinforcement learning is an area of machine learning in computer science, concerned with how an agent ought to take actions in an environment so as to maximize some notion of cumulative reward...

, evolutionary algorithms and adaptive robotics

Robotics

Robotics is the branch of technology that deals with the design, construction, operation, structural disposition, manufacture and application of robots...

, complexity theory

Complex systems

Complex systems present problems in mathematical modelling.The equations from which complex system models are developed generally derive from statistical physics, information theory and non-linear dynamics, and represent organized but unpredictable behaviors of systems of nature that are considered...

, in particular the theory of Kolmogorov complexity

Kolmogorov complexity

In algorithmic information theory , the Kolmogorov complexity of an object, such as a piece of text, is a measure of the computational resources needed to specify the object...

, theoretically optimal universal decision makers living in environments obeying arbitrary unknown but computable probabilistic laws, and mathematically sound general problem solvers such as Marcus Hutter

Marcus Hutter

Marcus Hutter is a German computer scientist and professor at the Australian National University. Hutter was born and educated in Munich, where he studied physics and computer science...

's asymptotically fastest algorithm for all well-defined problems.