IRIDIA participates in the project H2SWARM: Hierarchical Heterogeneous Swarm, funded by the European Science Foundation within the EUROCORES programme "Bio-inspired Engineering of Sensors, Actuators & Systems (EuroBioSAS)". The main goal of the project is the study of hierarchical communication and control strategies for swarms of heterogeneous robots, which, despite the differences among sub-groups, coherently operate in an integrated manner to achieve a common goal. This will be achieved by looking at how Nature structures and organises large groups, such as ant colonies or honeybee swarms.
Heterogeneous swarms pose a number of research questions that have been investigated only to a limited extent so far. For instance, what are the relevant interactions among heterogeneous groups that can lead to an overall coherent behaviour? How to design self-organising robotic systems with multiple levels of organisation, which can allow intra- and inter-group coordination? How do swarm robotic systems compare with more classical engineering approaches in practical application scenarios? The H2SWARM project will address these questions with a multidisciplinary approach that is strongly grounded on biological studies.
Best Video Award, AAAI-11 AI Video Competition - The video
"Swarmanoid, the movie" won the Best Video Award at the AAAI-11 AI
Video Competition! This video, written and directed by Mauro Birattari
and Rehan O'Grady, presents the main results of the Swarmanoid
project, a FET-OPEN project funded by the European Commission and
coordinated by Marco Dorigo. For more information, see the website of
the Swarmanoid project.
The fifth edition of "Programmation Orientée Objet" is out -
La programmation orientée objet est en quelque sorte le B.A.-BA des cursus informatiques, c'est pourquoi sa bonne compréhension est indispensable pour la suite de l'apprentissage. Étudiants et enseignants seront conquis par cette 5e édition qui détaille minutieusement tous les mécanismes, en s'appuyant sur des exemples concrets empruntés à Java, C#, C++, Python, PHP 5, UML 2 LinQ, etc. Une référence incontestable.
Le livre est disponible sur Amazon
The 11th European Conference on Artificial Life -
Hugues Bersini and Marco Dorigo from IRIDIA are part of the organising team. Back then, in the early 1990's, the first two ECAL conferences in Paris and Brussels were mainly centered on theoretical biology and the physics of complex systems. Today, we feel that Artificial Life can look back on these origins and take more inspiration from new developments at the intersection between computer science and theoretical biology—thus it is our wish to refocus the conference on complex biological systems. Closing a loop, this ECAL will mark the 20th anniversary of the 1st ECAL and will be framed as a tribute to the late Francisco Varela, co-organizer in 1991 with two of this year's committee members (Paul Bourgine, CREA, and Hugues Bersini, IRIDIA). We look forward to seeing you in Paris.
The Web site is : www.ecal11.org
