Ivo's Homepage

My mini-mini blog...

March. Oh, no. My sister wants to become Reiki Master so she can send me healing messages remotely in the future and the past. Can't she just use email? Will a Faraday cage protect me from that?

February. A dear aunt diagnosed with cancer. We really need to push science to fight this disease...

Research Interests

Currently, since August 2004, I am affiliated both here at IDSIA and at the IOSI Laboratory of Experimental Oncology on a joined project on "Data-mining in Bio-informatics". You'll find me juggling on huge amount of numbers of gene expression from micro-array data.

Here at IDSIA I was involved in the Swarm-bots project (lead by Luca Gambardella), a joint EU-Swiss project to study robot cooperative behaviour using principles inspired by biological systems such as ant colonies.

Previously I did research on reinforcement learning with Juergen Schmidhuber. Read about my Liouville Machine that uses Transport Theory to solve complex mazes. I have also implemented Baum and Durdanovic's Hayek --a multi-agent system that together learns complex tasks by paying and outbidding each other-- and extended it using external memory; see Hayek with memory

Before IDSIA, I have done research on image reconstruction in Optical Tomography (a brain scanner using near-infrared laser light) and design of holographic optical elements.

More about my research:

my publications
my PhD thesis
Me and Giovanni in the Cooperazione magazine!

Something about me

I was born in Surabaya (second largest city of Indonesia, on Java island) in 1969, but grew up in Holland (most densely populated country in Europe). After finishing my 'Engineer'-degree in Applied Physics at the Delft University of Technology, I went for a Master's to Japan at the (Hokkaido University) and after that stayed two years as research fellow at MEL (Tsukuba, Japan). Then, I decided to continue for a Ph.D. at the Department of Medical Physics of UCL (London, UK). Finally, I ended up here at IDSIA between the gorgeous mountains and beautiful lakes in Switzerland.

I got two nice sisters Tine (the one doing Reiki) and Lucie and a great brother Stefan. They all live in Holland, I seem to be the only 'nomad' in the family.

Favorite Quotes

Imagination is more important than knowledge. (Albert Einstein)
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe. (Albert Einstein)
If you copy from one, it's plagiarism; if you copy from many, it's research. (Wilson Mizner)

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