Marco Dorigo (born 26 August 1961, in Milan, Italy) is a research director for the Belgian Funds for Scientific Research and a co-director of IRIDIA, the artificial intelligence lab of the Université Libre de Bruxelles.He received a PhD in System and Information Engineering in 1992 from the Polytechnic University of Milan with a thesis titled Optimization, learning, and natural algorithms. He is the leading proponent of the ant colony optimization metaheuristic (see his book published by MIT Press in 2004), and one of the founders of the swarm intelligence research field. Recently he got involved with research in swarm robotics: he is the coordinator of Swarm-bots: Swarms of self-assembling artifacts and of Swarmanoid: Towards humanoid robotic swarms, two swarm robotics projects funded by the Future and Emerging Technologies Program of the European Commission. He is also the founding editor and editor in chief of Swarm Intelligence, the principal peer-reviewed publication dedicated to