Dr Marco Castellani Ph.D

Department of Mechanical Engineering
Associate Professor

Contact details

Email
m.castellani@bham.ac.uk
View my research portal
Address
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

Marco Castellani is an Associate Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He has done research for almost twenty years in a broad interdisciplinary area encompassing engineering, biology, and computer science. He has worked on a wide range of application areas including motor control, remote sensing, pattern recognition, optimisation, systems modelling, natural language processing, and ecological modelling. He has published over 40 research papers in scientific journals and international conferences.

He has a keen interest in evolutionary and swarm intelligence, and is particularly active in the development and characterisation of the Bees Algorithm. He is a passionate communicator on the theme of nature-inspired intelligence, and gives frequent talks on the subject.

Qualifications

  • Ph.D. in Intelligent Control, 2000, University of Wales, Cardiff (UK).
  • M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence with Engineering Applications, 1995, University of Wales, Cardiff (UK).
  • Laurea in Physics, 1993, University of Padova (I)

Biography

Marco Castellani obtained his Laurea in Physics from University of Padova in 1993, and M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence with Engineering Applications from University of Wales, Cardiff, in 1995. He stayed on in Cardiff where he completed his Ph.D. in 2000 with a dissertation on the “Intelligent Control of Manufacturing of Fibre Optic Components”. The evolutionary fuzzy algorithm developed during his doctoral studies became part of the alignment control software at Agilent fibre optics manufacturing plant in Ipswich – UK.  

He worked from 2001 until 2002 at Xtramind Technologies, a spin-off of the German Institute for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) based at the University of Saarbruecken (D). There he was involved in the research and development of neural network techniques for natural language processing.

From 2002 until 2005 he was at the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CENTRIA) of the New University of Lisbon (P), where he worked on applications of evolutionary neural networks to remote sensing and pattern recognition. In Lisbon, he was awarded twice post-doctoral funding by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) for his research project “Automated Identification of MEDiterranean water Eddies in the Atlantic” (AI-MEDEA), and contributed to the successful bid for the FCT-funded 3-years research project “Remote Detection of Mediterranean Water Eddies in the Northeast Atlantic” (RENA) in collaboration with the Institute of Oceanography of University of Lisbon.

In 2006 he returned to Cardiff University, where he was involved in research on quality control and machine vision in the FP7 Hydromel project on micro- and nano-manufacturing. While in Cardiff, he contributed to the development and characterisation of the Bees Algorithm.

In 2010 he moved to Norway, where he worked on individual-based models of marine environments at the Theoretical Ecology Group of the University of Bergen. In 2012 he started working also at the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research in Bergen, where he was involved in the development of an individual-based eco-genetic model of salmon population.

In October 2013 Marco Castellani joined the University of Birmingham.

Research

Research themes

Swarm Intelligence, Evolutionary Algorithms, Optimisation, Theoretical Ecology, Artificial Neural Networks, Computational Intelligence, Machine Vision, Intelligent Control, Manufacturing.

Research activity

Application of nature-inspired intelligence to engineering problems such as optimisation, control, non-parametric process modelling, vision, flexible manufacturing, engineering design, machine jobs scheduling, robot control, robot team coordination.

Publications

Journal papers

  • Pham, D.T. and Castellani, M. (2001), Intelligent Control of Fibre Optic Components Assembly, Proc. ImechE, part B, vol. 215, no. 9, pp. 1177-1189.
  • Pham, D.T. and Castellani, M. (2002), Outline of a New Evolutionary Algorithm for Fuzzy Systems Learning, Proc. ImechE, part C, vol. 216, no. 5, pp. 557-570.
  • Pham, D.T. and Castellani, M. (2002), Evolutionary Fuzzy Logic System for Intelligent Fibre Optic Components Assembly, Proc. ImechE, part C, vol. 216, no. 5, pp. 571-581.
  • Pham, D.T. and Castellani, M. (2002), Action Aggregation and Defuzzification in Mamdani-type Fuzzy Systems, Proc. ImechE, part C, vol. 216, no. 7, pp. 747-759.
  • Pham, D.T. and Castellani, M. (2006), Fuzzy Control of a System for Assembling Fibre Optic Transmitters, International Journal of Production Research, vol. 44, no. 17, pp. 3553-3571.
  • Castellani, M. (2006), Identification of Eddies from Sea Surface Temperature Maps with Neural Networks, International Journal Remote Sensing, vol. 27, no. 8, pp. 1601 - 1618.
  • Pham, D.T. and Castellani, M. (2006), Evolutionary Learning of Fuzzy Models, Engineering Applications of AI, vol. 19, no. 6, pp. 583-592.
  • Castellani, M. and Dos Santos, E.A. (2006), Forecasting Long-Term Government Bond Yields: an Application of Statistical and AI Models, WP series, Economics and Management Institute, TU Lisbon, www.iseg.utl.pt/departamentos/economia/index.php.
  • Castellani, M. and Rowlands, H. (2008), Evolutionary Feature Selection Applied to Artificial Neural Networks for Wood Veneer Classification, International Journal of Production Research, vol. 46, no. 11, pp. 3085–3105.
  • Castellani, M. and Marques, N.C. (2008), FeaSANNT - an Embedded Evolutionary Feature Selection Approach for Neural Network Classifiers, VIMation Journal, no. 1, pp. 46-53.
  • Castellani, M. and Rowlands, H. (2009), Evolutionary Artificial Neural Network Design and Training for Wood Veneer Classification, Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, no. 22, pp. 732-741.
  • Pham, D.T., Castellani, M. (2009), The Bees Algorithm – Modelling Foraging Behaviour to Solve Continuous Optimisation Problems. Proc. ImechE, Part C, vol. 223, no. 12, pp. 2919-2938.
  • Pham, D.T. and Castellani, M. (2010), Adaptive selection routine for evolutionary algorithms. J. Systems and Control Engineering, vol. 224, no. 16, pp. 623-633.
  • Castellani, M., Landot, R., Yang, M., Beyeler, F., (2011), A New Non-Contact Automatic Inspection Method for Micro-Structures. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part B: Journal of Engineering Manufacture, vol. 225, no. 6, pp.  867-879.
  • Pham, Q.T., Pham, D.T., Castellani, M., (2012), A modified bees algorithm and a statistics-based method for tuning its parameters. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part I: Journal of Systems and Control Engineering, vol. 226, no. 3, pp. 287-301.
  • Fahmy, A.A., Kalyoncu, M., Castellani, M., (2012), Automatic Design of Control Systems for Robot Manipulators Using the Bees Algorithm. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part I: Journal of Systems and Control Engineering, vol. 226, no. 4, pp. 497-508.
  • Castellani, M., Pham, Q.T., Pham, D.T., (2012), Dynamic Optimisation by a Modified Bees Algorithm. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part I: Journal of Systems and Control Engineering, vol. 226, no. 7, pp. 956–971.
  • Castellani, M., (2013), Evolutionary Generation of Neural Network Classifiers – An Empirical Comparison. Neurocomputing vol. 99, pp. 214-229.
  • Castellani, M., Rosland, R., Urtizberea, A., Fiksen. Ø., (2013), A mass-balanced pelagic ecosystem model with size-structured behaviourally adaptive zooplankton and fish. Ecological Modelling, vol. 251, pp. 54-63.
  • Castellani, M., Våge, S., Strand, E., Thingstad, T.F., Giske, J., (2013), The Scaled Subspaces Method: A new trait-based approach to model communities of populations with largely inhomogeneous density. Ecological Modelling, vol. 251, pp. 173-186.
  • Våge, S., Castellani, M., Giske, J., Thingstad, T.F., (2013), Successful strategies in size structured mixotrophic food webs. Acquatic Ecology, DOI: 10.1007/s10452-013-9447-y.
  • Pham, D.T. and Castellani, M. (2013), Benchmarking and Comparison of Nature-Inspired Population-Based Continuous Optimisation Algorithms, Soft Computing, DOI: 10.1007/s00500-013-1104-9.
  • Pham, D.T.,, Castellani, M., Le-Thi, H.A. (2013), Nature-Inspired Intelligent Optimisation using the Bees Algorithm, accepted Transactions on Computational Collective Intelligence (TCCI), Special Issue on Optimization and Learning: Theory, Algorithms and Applications

Book chapters

  • Castellani, M. and Dos Santos, E.A. (2014), Prediction of long-term government bond yields using statistical and artificial intelligence methods, in C. Faucher and L. C. Jain (eds.), Innovations in Intelligent Machines -4, Studies in Computational Intelligence 514, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-01866-9_11, Springer International Publishing Switzerland

Conference papers

  • Pham, D.T. and Castellani, M. (2002), Intelligent Automatic Alignment of Fibre Optic Components, Proc. 2002 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Hammamet – Tunisia, vol. 1, pp. 458- 465.
  • Pham, D.T. and Castellani, M. (2005), An Intelligent System for Manufacturing Fibre Optic Components, Proc. of the 1st Virtual International Conference on Intelligent Production Machines and Systems, Pham, D. T., Eldukhri, E. E. and Soroka, A. J. (eds), Elsevier (Oxford), pp. 155-162.
  • Castellani, M. (2005), Automatic detection of Mediterranean water eddies from satellite imagery of the Atlantic Ocean, Proc. of the 1st Virtual International Conference on Intelligent Production Machines and Systems, Pham, D. T., Eldukhri, E. E. and Soroka, A. J. (eds), Elsevier (Oxford), pp. 163-170.
  • Castellani, M. and Marques, N. C. (2005), Automatic Detection of Meddies Through Texture Analysis of Sea Surface Temperature Maps, Progress in Artificial Intelligence: Proc. 12th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence, EPIA 2005, Covilha, Portugal, December 5-8, 2005, Cardoso, A. Dias, G. and Bento, C. (eds.), Springer (Portugal), pp. 359-370.
  • Valko, M., Marques, N. C. and Castellani, M. (2005), Evolutionary Feature Selection for Spiking Neural Network Pattern Classifiers, Proc. 12th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence, EPIA 2005, Covilha, Portugal, December 5-8, 2005, IEEE Press (Portugal), pp. 181-187.
  • Castellani, M. (2006), A Neural Network Approach for Remote Detection of Marine Eddies, Proc. OCEANS 2006 Asia Pacific IEEE – Singapore.
  • Castellani, M. (2006), ANNE - A New Algorithm for Evolution of Artificial Neural Network Classifier Systems, Proc. IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC 2006), pp. 3294- 3301.
  • Pham, D.T., Castellani, M. and Ghanbarzadeh, A. (2007), Preliminary design using the Bees Algorithm, Proc. 8th International Conference and Exhibition on Laser Metrology, Machine Tool, pp. 420-429.
  • Castellani, M. and Marques, N. C. (2007), Neural Network Classifier Design Using the Evolutionary ANNE Algorithm, New Trends in Artificial Intelligence, proceedings EPIA 2007, pp. 240-251.
  • Pham, D.T., Castellani, M., Sholedolu, M. and Ghanbarzadeh, A. (2008), The Bees Algorithm and Mechanical Design Optimisation, Proc ICINCO 2008.
  • Pham, D.T., Pham, Q.T., Ghanbarzadeh, A. and Castellani, M. (2008), Dynamic Optimisation of Chemical Engineering Processes Using the Bees Algorithm, Proc IFAC 2008, pp. 6100-6105.
  • Pham, D.T., Castellani, M. and Fahmy A.A. (2008), Learning the Inverse Kinematics of a Robot Manipulator using the Bees Algorithm, 2008 6th IEEE International Conference on Industrial Informatics (INDIN 2008), pp. 493-498.
  • Pham, D.T., Castellani, M. and A.A. Fahmy (2009), Evolutionary Feature Selection for Artificial Neural Network Pattern Classifiers, 2009 7th IEEE International Conference on Industrial Informatics (INDIN 2009), pp. 658-663.
  • Pham, D.T., Packianather, M.S., Garcia Sanchez, M., and Castellani, M. (2009), Novel Feature Selection using Mutual Information and Fractal Dimension, 35th Annual Conference of IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IECON 2009), 3-5 Nov. 2009, pp. 3393 - 3398.
  • Yang, M., Castellani, M., Landot, R., Beyeler, F., Wang, Z., Pham, D.T., (2010), Automated optical inspection method for MEMS fabrication, Proc. of the 2010 International Conference on Mechatronics and Automation (ICMA), pp.1923,1931, 4-7 Aug. 2010.
  • Pham, D.T., Castellani, M., Le-Thi, H.A. (2011), Intelligent Optimisation, International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Systems Management, IESM’ 2011, May 25 - 27, 2011, Metz, F.
  • Pham, D.T., Castellani, M., Le-Thi, H.A. (2013), The Bees Algorithm: Modelling Nature to Solve Complex Optimisation Problems, 11th International Conference on Manufacturing Research (ICMR2013), 19-20 September 2013, Cranfield, UK.

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