Gerardo Beni (born Florence, Italy 21 February 1946) is a professor of electrical engineering at University of California, Riverside who, with Jing Wang, is known as the originator of the term swarm intelligence[1][2] in the context of cellular robotics and the concept of electrowetting,[3] with Susan Hackwood. He also devised, with Xuan-Li Xie, the Xie–Beni index[4] for measuring the validity of fuzzy clustering.
He is the author of "From Swarm Intelligence to Swarm Robotics" in the book Swarm Robotics[5]
Beni is married to Susan Hackwood. They have two children.