Dr. Mihir Suneel Durve is a Researcher at the Center for Life Nano- & Neuro-Science, Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT). He joined the institute as a Postdoctoral Researcher in October 2020 and was promoted to his current research role in April 2025. His work focuses on bridging computational modeling with physical systems, specializing in the development and deployment of computer vision and reinforcement learning frameworks directly onto physical machinery to replace specialized hardware instrumentation.
Mihir’s research trajectory at IIT includes conceptualizing and serving as a postdoctoral researcher and as the technical lead for the DropTrack project. He managed the project from the initial grant proposal writing stage through to the successful completion of all technical deliverables, which focused on establishing real-time computer vision pipelines to track droplet dynamics. The success of this project provided the foundational methodologies that enabled IIT's subsequent participation in the EU-funded EIC Pathfinder INSIGHT consortium. Currently, he leads IIT's work package within this multinational consortium, directing the design and execution of AI and computer vision pipelines for the manufacturing and quality control of bi-gel capsules in precision nutrition delivery.
His core technical and academic expertise lies at the intersection of computer vision, reinforcement learning, multi-agent reinforcement learning, swarm intelligence, and collective behavior. Mihir's research investigates how decentralized, local interaction rules in multi-agent systems give rise to emergent self-organized behaviors, translating these theoretical insights into robust, real-world automated pipelines and cloud-deployed microservices.