I am research director (DR1) at Inria, heading the Flowers team at Inria Bordeaux Sud-Ouest (see PhD students). I was previously a permanent researcher in Sony Computer Science Laboratory for 8 years (1999-2007).
I study lifelong autonomous learning, and the self-organization of behavioural, cognitive and language structures, at the frontiers of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cognitive sciences. I use machines as tools to understand better how children learn and develop. In return, I study how one can build machines that learn like children.
I also work on theoretical models of the origins and evolution of speech and language, studying the role of self-organization in neural networks and agents dynamical coupling. In the new edition of my book “Self-organization in the evolution of speech” (to appear in 2020 at OUP, CC-BY), I present an integrated view of the roles of self-organization and intrinsic motivation in the origins of language.
Curriculum Learning for training Deep RL agents that generalize
Portelas, R., Colas, C., Hofmann, K., & Oudeyer, P. Y. (2019). Teacher algorithms for curriculum learning of Deep RL in continuously parameterized environments. Proceedings of Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL 2019). See pdf and code.
Intrinsically Motivated Goal Exploration and Curriculum Learning
Kaplan, F., Oudeyer, P-Y (2003) Motivational principles for visual know-how development In Prince, C.G. et al., editors, Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Epigenetic Robotics : Modeling cognitive development in robotic systems, no. 101, pages 73-80, 2003. Lund University Cognitive Studies.
Jonathan Grizou; Iñaki Iturrate; Luis Montesano; Pierre-Yves Oudeyer; Manuel Lopes (2014) Calibration-Free BCI Based Control , Proceedings of Twenty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Jul 2014, Quebec, Canada. Bibtex
Adaptive Learning of how to Interpret Human Instruction/Social Signals
Link to information about the Poppy humanoid robot : Poppy Project web site. Poppy is an open-source 3D printed robot for science, education and art designed by the Flowers team. It was built to study the impact of the body on sensorimotor development and cognition: it makes it possible to really consider the body as an experimental variable. See article at Humanoids 2013 conference.
IniRobot: un kit pédagogique pour l'initiation à la robotique à l'école primaire
IniRobot: IniRobot est une série d’activités pédagogiques “clés en main” destinée à la découverte de la robotique et de la programmation à l’école primaire, en particulier lors des activités périscolaires. Ce kit est libre d’utilisation (Creative Commons CC-BY-SA) et utilise le robot Thymio développé à l’EPFL. Il est déployé en France dans les activités périscolaires des écoles de plusieurs villes, dont Lille, Talence et Lormont. Il a été développé par Didier Roy, Thomas Guitard et Pierre-Yves Oudeyer dans l’équipe Flowers, et est partagé sur le site participatif Dessine-moi un robot.
Art and Science
I collaborate regularly with artist within project that explore the frontiers between art and science. This has been the opportunity to create original connections between the general public and our scientific projects, in particular by bringing people to ask themselves and to ourselves stimulating questions about the position of such scientific projects within society at large.
C2M1 (2010): “associate scientist” with artists for an art live theatrical performance about the impact of technology upon language (with C2M1 group in Boulogne-Billancourt, lead by Magali Desbazeille and Siegfried Canto). Video complète du spectacle C2M ici.
I gave the 29th Gibson Lecture at University of Cornell, Ithaca. The talk was about “Active exploration mechanisms in autonomous learning and development” (slides), and in particular I presented several robotic and machine learning models of automatic intrinsically motivated curriculum learning.
The demonstration “Intrinsically motivated multitask reinforcement learning” built by the Flowers team was runner up of the NIPS 16 demo competition. This demonstration shows real time online acquisition of repertoires of high-dimensional nested skills (including tool use) with curiosity-drive goal exploration processes.
Together with J. Gottlieb and T. Gliga, we have co-organized the Second Interdisciplinary Symposium on Information Seeking, Curiosity and Attention in London, in september 2016. This great event has gathered researchers from neuroscience, psychology and computer science/machine learning: J. Nelson, D. Markant, R. Ligneul, S. Kouider, M. Gruber, K. Murayama, J. O’Reilly, G. Baldassarre, P. Dayan, P-Y. Oudeyer, K. Doya, W. Shultz, A. Bell, L. Hunt, J. Gottlieb, D. Bell, K. Begus, L. Goupil, L. Feigenson, D. Bavelier, T. Gliga. Most videos and slides of the symposium are available on the Neurocuriosity 2016 symposium web site.
Poppy project is an open-source platform for the creation, use and sharing of interactive 3D printed robots. It was initially developed by the Flowers team at Inria, and is now supported by a large community of contributors and users. The new website of Poppy Project is out, and provides all links to hardware, software and documentation resources to build and/or obtain an open-source 3D printed Poppy robot, under the Creative Commons licence (CC-BY-SA). Poppy Humanoid was the first worldwide open-source 3D printed full body humanoid robot. Poppy Torso and Poppy Ergo are other robots that can be built and modified with the Poppy platform. The Poppy platform is used widely for projects in open science, open education from primary schools to university, and art. Join the interdisciplinary community on the forum, and explore the GitHub repositories.