Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
Research Director, Inria Bordeaux Sud-Ouest, France
Dr. Pierre-Yves Oudeyer is Research Director at the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (Inria) and head of the Flowers lab and Ensta-ParisTech,France. He studies mechanisms of learning and development of sensorimotor, cognitive and social skills in humans and robots. Following a multidisciplinary approach, where computational and robotic sciences contribute to our understanding of humans, he focuses on the role self-organisation and active learning through interactions among brains, bodies and environment. In particular, he studies the role of curiosity and intrinsic motivation in the acquisition of new skills, and has been with his colleagues a pioneer in modelling curiosity in robots and artificial intelligence systems. These robotic experiments led to new hypotheses on the organisation of cognitive development in infants, and they progressively discover their body and how to interact with their environment. He also studied how new languages can form in populations of individuals, building and analysing populations of robots that invent and evolve their own languages.
Recently, his team began to study how fundamental models of learning in children could inform the design of educational technologies. In particular, his team designed new artificial intelligence algorithms allowing tutoring software to personalise teaching sequences. His team also designed the first world-wide open-source 3D printed humanoid robot Poppy, which later on led to educational kits allowing children to discover and understand interactive programmable objects.
He was awarded an ERC grant, the prize Le Monde for academic research, and has been previously working for 8 years at Sony Computer Science Lab, Paris.
He is editor of the IEEE CIS Newsletter on Autonomous Mental Development, and associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development, Frontiers in Neurorobotics, and of the International Journal of Social Robotics. He is also working actively for the diffusion of science towards the general public, through the writing of popular science articles and participation to radio and TV programs, as well as collaboration with artists and science exhibitions.
Web: http://www.pyoudeyer.com and http://www.poppy-projecr.org