PATENTS

I am the inventor or co-inventor of 15 patents covering 5 different technological issues (for more details and full list of patents, you can visit the European Patent Office web site):

Touchpad based human-robot interface for realizing joint attention

Together with Pierre Rouanet, we co-invented a human-robot interface which allows to efficiently show novel unknown objects to a robot and ensure joint attention. A typical realization of this technology uses smartphones such as the Iphone as a mediator interface.

Emotional Speech Synthesis

I am the inventor of several worldwide patents describing various aspects of a technology that describes the synthesis of emotional speech with computers. This technology has been integrated into the Qrio robot, and is being integrated into Playstation 3 video games.

Emotional Speech Recognition

I am the inventor of one worldwide patent describing a technique which is useful in the process of building machines that can recognize the emotion/attitude of a human based on the prosody of its speech.

Robot behavioural shaping

Together with Frederic Kaplan, I am the co-inventor of a technique inspired from clicker -training which allows to teach various behaviours to a robot in a way which is quite similar to way real dogs or dolphins are trained. This technology has been integrated in the software of the commercial version of the AIBO robot.

Active learning

Together with Frederic Kaplan, I am the co-inventor of 2 patents which describe a machine learning technology related to the capability of a learning machine to select autonomously its training examples so that each new example brings a maximal amount of information.
A part of this technology has been integrated in the Sony Qrio humanoid robot.

 

P

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