Luca Maria Gambardella

Luca Maria Gambardella is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Informatics of Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) and serves as the Vice Rector for Innovation and Corporate Relations at USI. He is also the co-director of the Artificial Intelligence Master program and affiliated with IDSIA (Istituto Dalle Molle di studi sull'intelligenza artificiale USI-SUPSI). Additionally, he is the Co-Founder, CTO & Head of Applied AI at Artificialy SA, a Lugano-based company.

His educational background includes a PhD in Engineering Sciences and Technology from ULB, École Polytechnique de Bruxelles, and a Master in Computer Science from the University of Pisa, Italy.

Gambardella's research spans several cutting-edge areas in artificial intelligence and robotics. His work focuses on meta-heuristics algorithms, particularly Ant Colony Optimization, as well as machine learning and swarm intelligence. In operational research, he specializes in scheduling, vehicle routing and robust optimization. His robotics research emphasizes swarm robotics, mobile robots, and drones, with particular interest in human-robot interaction and visual anomaly detection.

His recent publications (2023-2025) demonstrate a strong focus on optimization problems (particularly Traveling Salesman and Steiner Tree problems), robotics (swarm robotics, navigation, and human-robot interaction), and educational applications of computational thinking. A significant portion of his recent work combines traditional optimization techniques with modern machine learning approaches, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of his research.

• Ranked by Stanford University in the top 2% of scientists worldwide (2021-2023)
• Special Swiss ICT Award 2016 (with Juergen Schmidhuber)
• "Watt d'Or", Swiss award for best energy projects 2015

Gambardella has supervised 14 PhD theses (with four in progress) and has secured over 61 million CHF in research funding, including 26 Swiss National Science Foundation projects (20 as principal investigator), 7 European Projects, and numerous industrial collaborations. He leads the Swarm Robotics Lab at IDSIA and has been instrumental in establishing several research units and master's programs in intelligent systems.

His artistic endeavors include "the sense gallery" immersive space at FoxTown in Mendrisio, the interactive urban installation "Neuralrope#1" in Lugano-Besso pedestrian tunnel, and several published novels including "Sei Vite" (2013), "Il suono dell'alba" (2019), and "Segni particolari: tatuaggio con una stella a 5 punte sul polso sinistro" (2024).