Awards

2012: Together with Clément Moulin-Frier, Best paper award, category "Computational models of cognitive development", IEEE ICDL-Epirob International Conference, for our article "Curiosity-driven phonetic learning".

2009: ERC Starting Grant EXPLORERS, awarded by the European Research Council.

2009: Together with Thomas Schatz (student author), Best Student Paper award, IEEE International Conference on Developmental and Learning 2009, Shangaï, China (prize sponsored by the Cognitive Science Society).

2005: Together with Frédéric Kaplan, I was awarded the Implemented Invention Award (4th prize) by Sony Corporation, for our US patent No. 6760645 "Taming robots with clicker training".

2005: I was awarded the "Prix ASTI 2005", which is for the best pluri-disciplinary PhD thesis in the Science and Technologies of Information and Communication defended in France in the period 2003/2004.
communiqué du jury

2004: I was awarded the "Prix Le Monde de la recherche universitaire", which is a prize organized by the journal "Le Monde" with a jury of scientists, which elect every year the 15 best PhD thesis among those which were defended in the past year in french universities and in a field of exact sciences. 

2001: I received the " Best Application Paper" award in 2001 in the Artificial Evolution Conference, see web site.

2000: I received the "Best Paper Award" with Frederic Kaplan at the Sony Research Forum 2000, which is the yearly worldwide conference that gathers the engineers of Sony Corporation.

 

Project
highlights

Developmental Robotics
Active life-long learning, intrinsic motivation,
artificial curiosity
Social learning, human-robot interaction
Language acquisition in robots and humans
Modeling the evolution of language
Emotional Speech Synthesis and recognition