Carlo Pinciroli

I'm happy I survived the purge :-)

It was a blast to visit the @cbehav.bsky.social ! I am impressed by their concentration of talent and creativity.

I am also grateful for the warm hospitality of @swarmdynamics.bsky.social and @joefresna.bsky.social, who made this day even more special!

Let's write a paper already :-)

Today we’re thrilled to welcome Carlo Pinciroli @carlo.pinciroli.net from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute for our next CASCB Talk!
Join us at 12:00 to explore heterogeneity in robot swarms!
📍 ZT 702 & online

www.exc.uni-konstanz.de/collective-b...

Very happy to welcome a good friend @carlo.pinciroli.net in the wonderful Konstanz to speak about cool science for a couple of days! Hopefully, these meetings will trigger some fun collaboration!

We are excited to announce that the Fifteenth International Conference on Swarm Intelligence (ANTS 2026) will be taking place on June 8-10, 2026 in Darmstadt, Germany.

📅 Submissions: Nov 10, 2025
📅 Notification: Jan 30, 2026
📅 Conference: June 8-10, 2026
🌐 ants2026.org

Best week ever, with Josh Bloom defending his PhD dissertation titled "Global State Prediction for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning in Collective Transport." Congratulations!

Many thanks to Dr. Nicola Bezzo, Dr. Kevin Leahy, and Dr. Guanrui Li for your time and detailed feedback!

A headshot of Dr. Stephen Powers

More great news! Stephen Powers defended his PhD dissertation, "Symbolic Model Extraction in Homogeneous Heterogeneous Swarms."

Many thanks to Dr. Eliseo Ferrante, Dr. Kevin Leahy, and Prof. Bill Michalson, for your time and insightful feedback!

A headshot of Dr. Ashay Aswale

Great news! @ashay-aswale.bsky.social defended his PhD dissertation "Simultaneous Task Scheduling and Coalition Formation in Multi-robot Systems Using Centralized and Decentralized Methods."

Many thanks to Dr. Emanuele Garone, Dr. Kevin Leahy and Dr. Guanrui Li, for your time and great feedback!

Vim is the original escape room

Headline that says mushrooms may talk to one another with up to 50 words

so they're mycoblogging

Oh now that's something

I'm proud to announce that @khaiyichin.bsky.social defended his PhD dissertation titled "Sensing Through Faults: Collective Perception by Imperfect Robot Swarms."

Many thanks to @swarmdynamics.bsky.social, Dr. Kevin Leahy and Dr. Nitin Sanket, for your time and your thoughtful feedback!

More and more, BlueSky is where academics share their findings.

OpenAI.fm An interactive demo for developers to try the new text-to-speech model in the OpenAI API

If you press the gray button with the rotating arrows, it comes up eventually. It's perfect: www.openai.fm#758127b7-a79...

The Emo Teenager voice is also a huge highlight

This is the most important point of all and the reason why not every service to society should be private.

MIT builds swarms of tiny robotic insect drones that can fly 100 times longer than previous designs Scientists have built a new type of robotic insect that can fly 100 times longer than previous generations.

Robotic insects? Sound useful but still very creepy. @ericowens.bsky.social www.livescience.com/technology/r...

We're excited to announce the first Evolving Self-organisation workshop at GECCO 2025!

Submission deadline: March 26, 2025

More information: evolving-self-organisation-workshop.github.io

This review paper by @guillaume-garrigos.com on SGD-related algorithms is a fantastic resource, offering elegant, self-contained, and concise proofs in a single, accessible reference. arxiv.org/pdf/2301.11235

3/ AI breakthroughs like AlphaFold wouldn’t be possible without decades of work on datasets.

e.g., AlphaFold was trained on protein structures from the Protein Data Bank (PDB), which took 50+ years and ~$20 *billion* to create.

This is the kind of foundational effort AI needs.

In recent decades, wildland fires have been enabled by many factors, including the legacy of fire suppression, human settlement and distribution patterns, other management actions, and even natural climate variability. 1/

A First Introduction to Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has exploded in popularity in recent years. While numerous approaches have been developed, they can be broadly categorized into three main types: centralized ...

I have a draft of my introduction to cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning on arxiv. Check it out and let me know any feedback you have. The plan is to polish and extend the material into a more comprehensive text with Frans Oliehoek.

arxiv.org/abs/2405.06161

Why are evolved networks (such as gene and metabolic webs) different from engineering designs? One lesson is provided by evolved electronic circuits, as shown in this @sciam.bsky.social paper by John Koza
jstor.org/stable/pdf/2...

The good news about bees: Why they're returning to British gardens Thanks to a combination of efforts by beekeepers, better farming practices and reduced pesticide use, populations are showing signs of recovery

A rare actual good news story: bees – both honey bees and wild bees – seem to be doing better in the UK.

Bee-friendly planting, less pesticide use and an uptick in beekeeping are all having results 🐝 🎉 inews.co.uk/inews-lifest...

Astonishing how many RL bottlenecks are resolved simply by “make simulator go fast”. What if we had prioritized engineering over algorithms years ago?

I have tried and failed to make a similar argument for years. Every NSF proposal I submit about SoftEng for robotics gets destroyed because it's understood as mere development. It's much more, making the right tools yields thinking frameworks that become productivity and creativity amplifiers.

1/ Okay, one thing that has been revealed to me from the replies to this is that many people don't know (or refuse to recognize) the following fact:

The unts in ANN are actually not a terrible approximation of how real neurons work!

A tiny 🧵.

🧠📈 #NeuroAI #MLSky

Pretty much my inner voice as I write proposals

In today's lecture in my nonlinear dynamics and chaos course, I tried to give intuition for where chaos comes from. It's caused by repeated stretching and folding of phase space.

Bird-inspired drone can jump for take-off EPFL researchers have built a drone that can walk, hop, and jump into flight with the aid of birdlike legs, greatly expanding the range of potential environments accessible to unmanned aerial vehicles...

Nothing cooler than emulating nature very well: "Bird-inspired drone can jump for take-off" [via EPFL News] 🧪🤖🐦

"EPFL researchers have built a drone that can #walk, #hop, and #jump into #flight with the aid of birdlike legs..."

actu.epfl.ch/news/bird-in...

#robotics #bird #drone #mechatronics