Alessio Franci honoured by the IEEE for his work on collective decision-making
Alessio Franci, lecturer at the Neuroengineering Lab of the Montefiore Institute (Faculty of Applied Sciences, ULiège), is the winner of the IEEE CSS George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award. He was awarded this prize for a paper proposing a new mathematical model of collective opinion formation, opening up applications in robotics as well as cognitive and social sciences.
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he award was presented to him at the 64th IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Conference on Decision and Control, held in Rio de Janeiro in December 2025. This award recognises a paper in which Alessio Franci and his co-authors introduce a non-linear, multi-agent model of opinion dynamics, based on saturation interactions. This theoretical framework enables the description of how groups of agents – humans, animals or machines – manage to reach consensus, maintain lasting disagreements or rapidly shift from one collective state to another depending on the context.
The originality of the approach lies in the integration of several mathematical fields (spectral graph theory, equivariant bifurcation theory and multi-agent control) to model how collective decisions emerge, stabilise or amplify in a cascade. The potential applications are numerous: swarms of autonomous robots, distributed systems, political polarisation, social influence, collective animal behaviour, and task allocation.
The award-winning work was initiated whilst Alessio Franci was a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Since his arrival in Liège, the University of Liège and the WEL Research Institute have provided him with the ideal environment for developing and deepening this research. His current work falls more broadly within the field of brain-inspired computing, an area at the intersection of control theory and neuromorphic engineering, within which Alessio Franci develops rigorous mathematical frameworks for embodied intelligent systems, with applications in computational neuroscience, robotics and the design of next-generation sensors and actuators.
About the IEEE
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is the world’s largest professional organisation dedicated to engineers and scientists in the fields of electronics, electrical engineering, computing and related technologies. Founded in 1963, it now has over 400,000 members in more than 160 countries and annually awards prizes that are highly regarded within the global scientific and engineering community.
The award received by Alessio Franci, the IEEE CSS George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award, is presented by the Control Systems Society (CSS), the IEEE division specialising in automatic control systems. It is one of the most prestigious awards in this specific field.
