“Swarm Intelligence” Expert visits DCU

Left to right: Professor Michael Ryan, Head, DCU School of Computing; Professor Russell Eberhart, Purdue University, Indianapolis; and Mr. Ray Walshe, DCU Biocomputation Laboratory

Professor Russell C. Eberhart from Purdue University, Indianapolis visited DCU on Wednesday July 20 th to give a talk on "Swarm Intelligence: Concepts to Applications” under the IEEE Distinguished Lecturer Programme.

Swarm intelligence is a fascinating artificial intelligence technique based around the study of collective behaviour in decentralised, self-organised systems. Examples abound in the animal world, where the collective behaviour of ants, bees and fish (unsophisticated agents) with their environment causes coherent global patterns to emerge.

Swarm intelligence offers researchers and scientists a tool for exploring collective or distributed problem solving. Its ability to solve these problems leads to various practical real world applications, such as networking, games, robotics, and traffic routing, and potentially even simulating the global economy. Professor Eberhart explained to a packed seminar room how the U. S. Marine Corps has used swarm intelligence for logistics scheduling, and how it has also been used for medical analysis/diagnosis of Parkinson's disease.

Professor Russell Eberhart is Chair and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI).  A leading expert in the field of artificial intelligence, he co-authored Computational Intelligence PC Tools, published in 1996 by Academic Press; Swarm Intelligence, published by Morgan Kaufmann/Academic Press in 2001; and Computational Intelligence: Concepts to Implementations , to be published in 2005 by Morgan Kaufmann/ Academic Press.

Following a meeting with Professor Michael Ryan, Professor Heather Ruskin and Ray Walshe of the School of Computing, Professor Eberhart commented that, “Our mutual discussions of extended analog computing lead me to believe that collaboration between Indiana University, the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology at Indianapolis, and Dublin City University should be pursued. This is an exciting time for research in particle swarm optimization, also, and cooperation in this area is welcome.”

The School of Computing's Modelling and Scientific Computing research group, which hosted the talk, conducts research into computational models and scientific applications of computing. Current research projects include agricultural and environmental analysis, biocomputation, financial modelling, parallel and distributed computing, traffic flow analysis, and pattern matching and visualisation. The Group has 28 members, comprising 12 academics and 16 Masters and Doctoral students.

After a tour of the Biocomputation Resarch Laboratory, and discussions with researchers involved, Professor Eberhart added that, “I enjoyed meeting the students, and learning about their areas of research. It seems that there may be some possible applications of swarm intelligence to some of the areas, such as clustering and traffic analysis.”

Professor Eberhart is a Fellow of the IEEE and of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. He holds four United States patents.  He thanked the IEEE for facilitating his visit through the Distinguished Lecturer Programme, by invitation from Invitation the IEEE UKRI Computational Intelligence Chapter, and concluded “It was my first visit to Ireland; I hope to return soon.”