ANDREAGIOVANNI'S BIOGRAPHY

I am a Research Group Leader at the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour Collective Behaviour of the University of Konstanz and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour, in Konstanz, Germany. I am also a Visiting Fellow of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies on Artificial Intelligence (IRIDIA), of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium), led by Prof. Marco Dorigo; and of the Natural Robotics Lab of the University of Sheffield (UK), led by Prof. Roderich Gross.
My research group works on modelling and controlling collective behaviour in groups of individuals without a leader, with particular interest to the topics of group decision making, swarm robotics, and collective cognition.

From 2021 to 2023, I was a FNRS Research Fellow in Collective Behaviour at the IRIDIA, the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies on Artificial Intelligence, of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, in Belgium, working on the FNRS project HECOROS—Heterogeneity for Cost-Effective Robot Swarms—with Prof. Marco Dorigo.

From 2015 to 2020, I was a Research Fellow in Collective Robotics at the Behavioural and Evolutionary Theory Lab of the University of Sheffield, in the UK, as part of the ERC project DiODe - Distributed Algorithms for Optimal Decision-Making led by Prof. James Marshall. From 2019 to 2021, I have also been the Principal Investigator of the ONRG Swarm Awareness project together with Prof. James Marshall.

From 2011 to 2015, I conducted my research as Ph.D. student at IRIDIA, Université Libre de Bruxelles, in Belgium, under the supervision of Prof. Marco Dorigo and Dr. Vito Trianni.
My Ph.D. work has been part of the two European Projects E-SWARM - Engineering Swarm Intelligence Systems and DICE - Distributed Cognition Engineering.

Before joining IRIDIA, I collaborated with IDSIA (Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence) in Lugano, Switzerland, from November 2009 till April 2011, within the context of the European Project (FP6) Swarmanoid. Here, I initially conducted my master thesis under the supervision of Dr. Gianni Di Caro and Prof. Luca Gambardella. Then, after graduation, I prolonged my research collaboration of a few months. My work at IDSIA focused on the use of a ceiling camera network to perform distributed path planning for ground robots.

I conducted my bachelor and master studies at Politecnico di Milano - Department of Electronics and Information in the campus of Como, Italy, where I specialised in robotics, artificial intellidence and web technologies. I graduated with a first class honours Master of Science Degree in Computer Engineering.

During my studies, I worked for one year on the EU Project: PHAROS (Platform for searcHing of Audiovisual Resources across Online Spaces). A part of the work has been conducted in Milano (Italy) at WebModels srl, and another part at Microsoft (Fast Search & Transfer) in Oslo, Norway, thanks to a European scholarship.

I happily grew up in Como, my hometown, which is situated in the North of Italy.