Prof. Dario Floreano is director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). Between 2010 and 2022, he was the founding director of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Robotics, a research program that graduated almost 200 PhD students and more than 100 postdocs, funded two professorships at EPFL and University of Zurich, created the EPFL Master's program in Robotics and the annual Swiss Robotics Day,
helped launch Cybathlon, and generated more than 15 robotics
spinoffs that created several hundred jobs.
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 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 three drone companies (senseFly.com, Flyability.com, Elythor.com) and a non-for-profit portal on robotics and A.I. (RoboHub.org).
Books:
Tales from a Robotics World: How intelligent machines will shape our future, MIT Press, 2022
Flying Insects and Robots, Springer Verlag, 2010
Bio-Inspired Artificial Intelligence, MIT Press, 2008
Evolutionary Robotics, MIT Press, 2000
Manuale sulle Reti Neurali, il Mulino (in Italian), 1996 (first edition), 2006 (second edition)