Coordination
Guidance and collective-behaviour methods for multi-agent systems, centred on swarm shepherding: a few control agents guiding the emergent behaviour of a much larger group.
How it works →Distributed and collaborative intelligence
Autonomous systems that stay reliable when no single agent sees the whole picture.
I am Dr Heba El-Fiqi, Senior Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence at UNSW Canberra. I work on distributed and collaborative intelligence for autonomous systems: how individual agents can coordinate, learn, and act reliably under limited compute and partial information.
25+Peer-reviewed outputs
425+Citations
AUD 1.2M+Competitive grants
IEEESenior Member
PLOS ONEAcademic Editor
Two sides of one problem
The learning each agent needs
Gated learning architectures that recover and reason over partial, noisy, high-dimensional signals, so each agent can act on what it can actually observe.
How it works →Selected work
- IEEE Trans. Cybernetics Weighted Gate Layer Autoencoders: a learnable gating mechanism for modelling inter-variable dependencies and reconstructing missing signals.
- IEEE Access The Limits of Reactive Shepherding Approaches for Swarm Guidance: a benchmark critique that reshaped later shepherding models.
- IEEE SMC Adversarial Patrolling Using a Shepherding Approach: reframing patrolling as a reactive, force-based multi-agent problem.
Community
Building the next generation
I lead the IJCNN Mentoring Program within the IEEE CIS Student and Early Career Mentoring Program, and serve as Vice-Chair of the IEEE CIS Mentoring and Skills Development Sub-Committee, which runs these activities across the Society's flagship conferences. I am also an Academic Editor at PLOS ONE.
Leadership and service →From method to readiness
I bring both pillars together in applied autonomy, through funded projects with industry and research partners that move methods toward real-world readiness, including hardware-in-the-loop testing.
Research →News
- 2026Led the IJCNN Mentoring Program, part of the IEEE CIS Student and Early Career Mentoring Program, at IEEE WCCI 2026, Maastricht.
- 2026Paper accepted at IEEE SMC 2026: Prime-Weighted Exponential Neurons: Traceability in Artificial Intelligence and Robotic Systems.
- 2026Paper accepted at the HFES International Annual Meeting (ASPIRE 2026) on AI for uncrewed aerial systems operator training.
- Jan 2026Led the robotics activity at the National Youth Science Forum.
- 2024Elevated to IEEE Senior Member; appointed Treasurer of the Canberra ACM-W Chapter.