I received a Master's degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy, in 1997, and a doctoral degree in Information Technologies from the faculty of Engineering of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium, in 2004. Since 1997, I work as an academic researcher in the field of computational intelligence. I am currently with IRIDIA, CoDE, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium, as a directeur de recherches (research director) of the fund for scientific research F.R.S.–FNRS of Belgium's Wallonia-Brussels Federation. I have been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant for the project "DEMIURGE: automatic design of robot swarms" — ERC-2015-CoG: project started in October 2016. My research interests are in computational intelligence: swarm intelligence, swarm robotics, metaheuristics for combinatorial optimization, machine learning, and automatic design. I am also interested in epistemology and in the philosophical foundations of computational intelligence.