ACSOS 2026
Mon 7 - Fri 11 September 2026 Cesena, Italy
ACSOS 2026 (series) /

Keynotes

We are proud to include the following high-profile keynotes into our program this year:




Marco Dorigo (Université Libre de Bruxelles): Bridging Centralized and Decentralized Control in Robot Swarms through Self-Organizing Hierarchies

Abstract: Robot swarms promise scalable and resilient solutions for applications such as environmental monitoring, search and rescue, and logistics, yet their adoption remains limited by poor controllability. Fully self-organizing swarms achieve robustness and scalability through decentralized coordination and simple local interactions, but this comes at the cost of limited observability and difficulty in shaping global behavior. Conversely, centralized approaches offer ease of control but suffer from scalability issues and single points of failure.

In this talk, I present the Self-Organizing Nervous System for Robot Swarms (SoNS), a middleware framework that enables robots to dynamically form adaptive hierarchical structures. SoNS bridges centralized and decentralized paradigms by supporting functionally centralized coordination of sensing, actuation, and decision-making, while preserving the scalability, flexibility, and fault tolerance of self-organizing systems.

Marco Dorigo
Biosketch: Marco Dorigo received the Ph.D. degree in electronic engineering in 1992 from Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy. From 1992 to 1993, he was a Research Fellow at the International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, CA. In 1993, he was a NATO-CNR Fellow, and from 1994 to 1996, a Marie Curie Fellow. Since 1996, he has been a tenured Researcher of the FNRS, the Belgian National Funds for Scientific Research, and co-director of IRIDIA, the artificial intelligence laboratory of the ULB. His current research interests include swarm intelligence, swarm robotics, and metaheuristics for discrete optimization. He is the Founding Editor of Swarm Intelligence, and an Associate Editor or member of the Editorial Boards of many journals on computational intelligence and adaptive systems. Dr. Dorigo is a Fellow of the AAAI, ACM, EurAI, and IEEE. He was awarded numerous international prizes among which the Marie Curie Excellence Award in 2003, delivered by Philippe Busquin, European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation; the five-year scientific prize du F.R.S.-FNRS in 2005, delivered by Albert II, King of Belgium; the Cajastur International Prize for Soft Computing “Mamdani Prize” in 2007, delivered by Prof. Lofti Zadeh; the IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award in 2015, and the IEEE Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award in 2016. He is also the recipient of an ERC Advanced Grant awarded by the European Research Council.

Ivona Brandic (TU Wien)

Abstract: coming soon.

Ivona Brandic
Biosketch: Ivona Brandic is a Full Professor for High Performance Computing Systems at the Institute of Computer Engineering, TU Wien, Vienna, Austria, where she leads the Research Unit for Computational Sustainability, her current research focuses on cloud computing, edge intelligence, and hybrid quantum-classical systems, with key contributions to sustainable and adaptive resource management as well as green AI.

Valeria Cardellini (Tor Vergata University of Rome)

Abstract: coming soon.

Valeria Vardellini
Biosketch: Valeria Cardellini is a Full Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy. She received the Ph.D. degree in computer science and automation engineering in 2001 from the same university. Her main research interests are in the field of distributed software systems and services, including Cloud and Edge systems and services, resource management and self-adaptation, quality assurance.

Doctoral Symposium keynote:

Carlo Ghezzi (Politecnico di Milano): Being a researcher — in turbulent times

Abstract: In 2020 I wrote a book titled “Being a Researcher— An Informatics Perspective”, in which I tried to share what I learned in my long journey through research, targeting especially young scientists and telling them what I wish I knew when I embarked on the journey. This talk reflects on what happened since.

After less than a decade, the research landscape is undergoing a paradigm change, in the Kuhnian sense, mainly due to the advances in our own discipline, and in particular, the AI revolution. This has generated radical changes in the way research is performed, in all fields. But technological disruption is not only a methodological challenge; it is above all an ethical and institutional one. The way society and individuals are affected by our research, and the responsibilities we have as researchers have in fact scaled up to unprecedented levels. Academic institutions need to rethink their role in the new world we are building.

The talk reflects on our role and responsibility as researchers and educators in the new world— and on whether our institutions are ready for it.

Marco Dorigo
Biosketch: Carlo Ghezzi is an Emeritus Professor at Politecnico di Milano, Italy, where he has been active for more than 50 years as a researcher, faculty member, and educator. Among other roles, he has been founding Chair of Software Engineering, Department Chair, Member of the Academic Senate, Vice-Rector for Research, Chair of the Ethical Committee. He holds an Honorary Doctor Degree from the Technical University of Vienna. He is an ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, member of Academia Europaea, member of the Italian academy Istituto Lombardo Accademia di Scienze e Lettere. He has been awarded the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award, the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Service Award, the IEEE TCSE Distinguished Education Award, the Leloir Prize by the Government of Argentina for International Cooperation in Science, Technology and Innovation. He has been on the advisory board of several international research programs and institutions in Europe, China, Japan, and the USA. He has been President of Informatics Europe, the association of computer science departments and research laboratories in Europe. Carlo Ghezzi has been Program Co-Chair and General chair of several prestigious conferences (including the two flagship conferences on Software Engineering, ICSE and ESEC) and member of the program committee of many international conferences.  He has been Editor in Chief of the ACM Trans. on Software Engineering and Methodology, Associate Editor of Communications of the ACM, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Science of Computer Programming.

Ghezzi’s research has been focusing on software engineering and programming languages. He co-authored over 200 papers and 15 books, and coordinated several national and international research projects. He was awarded an Advanced Grant from the ERC (European Research Council). He is currently a Steering Committee member of the Digital Humanism Initiative (https://caiml.org/dighum/).