Brief Biography
Frederic Kaplan graduated as an engineer of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Telecommunications in Paris and received a Ph.D. degree in Artificial Intelligence from the University Paris VI. In his studies and research projects, he has always shown a double interest, both in understanding principles governing living systems and in the construction of biologically inspired systems. He worked 10 years at Sony CSL in Paris where he started to develop, with his colleague Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, a new family of theoretical architectures based on the notion of intrinsic motivation systems. In particular, he explored the principles that permit an agent to compute its own learning progress in various situations and act in order to maximize it. More recently, he joined Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne to supervise a new team of researchers inside the CRAFT laboratory. While exploring novel forms of robotic devices, he is now continuing collaborations with neuroscientists, psychologists and designers with the objective of creating tighter links between these disciplines and helping the emergence of a novel promising research field: neurorobotics.