Luca Maria Gambardella

Luca Maria Gambardella (born 4 January 1962) 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 Artificial Ants, a set of multi-agent methods inspired by the pheromone-based communication of biological ants. His 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 routing on the internet and in ad-hoc networks with mobile nodes. He is also Chief Scientific Officer of the IDSIA spin-off AntOptima, whose commercial applications of `Ant Colony Optimization' include vehicle routing for large commercial truck fleets, and the management of container flow through the largest Mediterranean container terminal.