Andreagiovanni Reina
FNRS Research Fellow in Collective Behaviour, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
I am 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. I am currently working on the FNRS project HECOROS—Heterogeneity for Cost-Effective Robot Swarms—with Prof. Marco Dorigo.
I am also a Visiting Fellow of the the University of Sheffield, in the UK, as part of the Natural Robotics Lab led by Roderich Gross.
My research interests are collective decision making, swarm robotics and distributed cognition.
WHAT I DO
I use mathematical and computational models to study collective intelligence. My focus is on understanding and controlling distributed decision making processes. These decision processes can be observed in several systems in nature, from insects colonies to neurons. I try to understand them better and to use this knowledge to engineer distributed systems, such as robot swarms or mobile sensor networks. I often validate my studies by showcasing swarm robotics experiments.SHORT-BIO
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 Prof. Luca Gambardella and Dr. Gianni Di Caro. 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.
17-21 April 2023 Invited lecture
Honoured to have been invited as a speaker at the conference Interdisciplinary challenges: from non-equilibrium physics to life sciences held in Rome (17-21 April 2023). I will be speaking of "Undecided individuals can restore agreement when asocial behaviour hinders group consensus". Hope to see you in Rome!
2023-03-15 New article
The article "Asynchrony rescues statistically-optimal group decisions from information cascades through emergent leaders" by Andreagiovanni Reina, T. Bose, V. Srivastava, and James A.R. Marshall has been accepted for publication in Royal Society Open Science. In our work, we information cascades in networks of Bayes-optimal individuals with a limited cognitive load.
2023-03-14 Invited lecture
For the Brain Awareness Week of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, I'll give a talk on "The honeybees may unlock the secrets of how the human brain works" (in French, Les abeilles peuvent révéler les secrets du fonctionnement du cerveau humain)
More info: braincouncil.be.
A story based on my research with James Marshall, Vito Trianni, Thomas Bose, and Angelo Pirrone. Main articles on this subject: this and this.
2022-08-29 New article
The article "Magnitude-sensitive reaction times reveal non-linear time costs in multi-alternative decision-making" by James A.R. Marshall, Andreagiovanni Reina, Célia Hay, Audrey Dussutour, and Angelo Pirrone has been accepted for publication in PLoS Computational Biology. In our work, we study multi-alternative decision making in humans and slime moulds, and link the experimental results with normative models of optimal policies.