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dr. ir. Eliseo Ferrante

Assistant Professor, Faculty of Science, Artificial intelligence

Assistant Professor, Network Institute

Assistant Professor, Research Programmes - Science, Artificial Intelligence (section level)

Personal information

Eliseo Ferrante is Assistant Professor (UD1) in the Department of Computer Science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His background is in computer science, artificial intelligence, robotics, and complex systems. He holds a PhD in Applied Sciences and Engineering from Université Libre de Bruxelles and degrees in computer science and computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago and Politecnico di Milano.

His academic work combines research, teaching, and supervision, with a particular focus on understanding and designing intelligent behaviour in groups of autonomous agents. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and holds a Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education.

Research

Eliseo Ferrante’s research focuses on collective intelligence, swarm robotics, multi-agent systems, artificial intelligence, and complex systems. He studies how groups of autonomous agents can coordinate, learn, make decisions, and adapt through decentralized interactions.

His research has addressed collective motion, aggregation, distributed decision-making, leadership in collective systems, and automatic design and learning of swarm behaviours. More recent interests include heterogeneous robotic collectives, distributed learning, embodied intelligence, and autonomous systems operating under realistic sensing and communication constraints.

His work combines mathematical and computational modelling, simulation, machine learning, and experiments with robotic systems. A central theme is understanding how individual-level rules and information exchange give rise to robust and adaptive collective behaviour.

He has published extensively in robotics, artificial intelligence, and complex systems and has supervised research at doctoral, master’s, and undergraduate levels.

Teaching

At Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Eliseo Ferrante has co-deveoped and taught Learning Machines (MSc, Artificial Intelligence) and developed from scratch Project Collective Intelligence (BSc, formely known as Project Embodied AI).

Learning Machines uses reinforcement learning and evolutionary algorithms to design robot controllers in simulation and transfer them to physical robots. Project Collective Intelligence focuses on the simulation and study of emergent collective behaviour in multi-agent systems.

He has also been involved in bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral supervision at VU. His teaching and supervision have contributed to a progression in which students move from courses to teaching-assistant and senior teaching-assistant roles, thesis projects, and research activities, with several subsequently continuing toward research careers.

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