ERC Advanced Grant – The European Research Council awards an ERC Advanced Grant to Marco Dorigo for his project "E-SWARM -- Engineering Swarm Intelligence Systems". The E-SWARM project concerns "swarm intelligence", a branch of artificial intelligence that deals with natural and artificial systems composed of many individuals who present collective behavior exploiting decentralized control and self-organization. The project will focus on the design and implementation of artificial swarm intelligence systems for the solution of complex problems. Currently, the understanding of artificial swarm intelligence largely relies on individual intuitions of experienced researchers. This is not sufficient for the design of swarm intelligence systems at the level of complexity required by real-world applications. The goal of the E-SWARM project is therefore to develop a rigorous engineering methodology for the design and implementation of artificial swarm intelligence systems.

Decision Sights A new Spin-Off, called "Decision Sights", has been created on February 16 2010. This initiative has been supported by a "First Spin-Off" project sponsored by the Walloon region. The company is specialized in the development of multicriteria decision aid solutions. The core product "D-SIGHT" is based on the renown PROMETHEE & GAIA methodologies. It integrates visual interactive tools and offers a number of innovative analysis techniques. The Decision Sights team benefits from active collaborations with experts of the CoDE-SMG laboratory. Their broad experience in the practice of multicriteria decision aid guarantees high quality consultancy services and efficient training courses.
More info at www.decision-sights.com.

Book A new French book by Hugues Bersini that aims at explaining key phenomena of the current information technology through famous movies. The topics being covered are AI, microprocessors, security, object orientation, open source, networks, robotics. Movies such as 2001 Space Odyssey, AI, Minority Report, The Net, You've got a mail, Millennium and many others are exploited to shed new light on these topics.
Ellipses link

Book – The book Tuning Metaheuristics: A machine learning perspective by Mauro Birattari lays the foundations for a scientific approach to tuning metaheuristics. By adopting a machine learning perspective, the author gives a formal definition of the tuning problem, develops a generic algorithm for tuning metaheuristics, and defines an appropriate experimental methodology for assessing the performance of metaheuristics. The book is published by Springer.

Research project – "Meta-X: Metaheuristics for Complex Optimization Problems" is a collaborative project between the IRIDIA and SMG laboratories of CoDE. The research topic of Meta-X is the study of metaheuristics for the solution of difficult problems in discrete optimization. In Meta-X we will tackle problems that have multiple objectives, dynamically changing characteristics or data, or where some information is stochastic, and combinations of such features. Meta-X is an Action de Recherche Concertée funded by the Scientific Research Directorate of the French Community of Belgium. It started on October 1, 2008, and will last five years.

Publication in Nature – Francisco C. Santos, FNRS postdoctoral researcher at IRIDIA, published, together with Marta D. Santos and Jorge M. Pacheco, the paper titled "Social diversity promotes the emergence of cooperation in public goods games", in the prestigious journal "Nature" (10 July 2008).

Research project – “Evolving a collective consciousness for a swarm of pico-satellites” is a project funded by the ARIADNA program of the European Space Agency awarded to IRIDIA in 2007-2008.

International prize – On November 27, 2007, Prof. Lofti Zadeh presented to Marco Dorigo the "Cajastur International Prize for Soft Computing".

New project – The Varibru project started on October 1st, 2007. VariBru will address the paradox of the ICT industry in the domain of variability: How to maintain efficiency while at the same time offer a much richer product variety to the customers? Varibru is a research project supported by the Brussels Capital Region. In addition to CoDE, there are five other teams taking part in the project: Sirris, VUB-PROG and VUB-SSEL, VUB-WISE and UCL-INGI.