IDSIA

The Swiss institute for Artificial Intelligence 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, affiliated with the University of Lugano and SUPSI in Ticino, Switzerland.

One of the main research themes at IDSIA are the Artificial Ants, which are multi-agent methods inspired by the pheromone-based communication of biological ants, pioneered by former IDSIA senior researcher Marco Dorigo and IDSIA's co-director (since 1995) Luca Maria Gambardella. IDSIA's combinations of Artificial Ants and local search algorithms have become a method of choice for numerous optimization tasks involving some sort of graph, such as vehicle routing and internet routing. The burgeoning activity in this field has led to numerous commercial 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 algorithms for brain-inspired artificial recurrent neural networks, reinforcement learning, evolutionary algorithms and adaptive robotics, complexity theory, in particular the theory of Kolmogorov complexity, 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's "asymptotically fastest algorithm for all well-defined problems".

[http://www.idsia.ch/ IDSIA home page]