Dario FloreanoProf. Dario Floreano is director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). Since 2010, he is the founding director of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Robotics, a research program that brings together more than 20 labs across Switzerland. Prof. Floreano holds an M.A. in Vision, an M.S. in Neural Computation, and a PhD in Robotics. He has held research positions at Sony Computer Science Laboratory, at Caltech/JPL, and at Harvard University. His main research interests are Robotics and A.I. at the convergence of biology and engineering. Prof. Floreano made pioneering contributions to the fields of evolutionary robotics, aerial robotics, and soft robotics. He served in numerous advisory boards and committees, including the Future and Emerging Technologies division of the European Commission, the World Economic Forum Agenda Council, the International Society of Artificial Life, the International Neural Network Society, and in the editorial committee of several scientific journals. In addition, he helped spinning off two drone companies (senseFly.com and Flyability.com) and a non-for-profit portal on robotics and A.I. (RoboHub.org). Books
Manuale sulle Reti Neurali, il Mulino (in Italian), 1996 (first edition), 2006 (second edition)Evolutionary Robotics, MIT Press, 2000
Bio-Inspired Artificial Intelligence, MIT Press, 2008
Flying Insects and Robots, Springer Verlag, 2010
Boi FaltingsProfessor Faltings joined EPFL in 1987 as professor of Artificial Intelligence. He holds a PhD degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a diploma from the ETHZ. His research has spanned different areas of intelligent systems linked to model-based reasoning. In particular, he has contributed to qualitative spatial reasoning, case-based reasoning (especially for design problems), constraint satisfaction for design and logistics problems, multi-agent systems, and intelligent user interfaces. His current work is oriented towards multi-agent systems and social computing, using concepts of game theory, constraint optimization and machine learning. In 1999, Professor Faltings co-founded Iconomic Systems, a company that developed a new agent-based paradigm for travel e-commerce. He has since co-founded 5 other startup companies and advised several others. Prof. Faltings has published more than 150 refereed papers on his work, and participates regularly in program committees of all major conferences in the field. He has served as associate editor of of the major journals, including the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) and the Artificial Intelligence Journal. From 1996 to 1998, he served as head of the computer science department.
