Contact

pierre-yves dot# oudeyer at inria.fr

Popular science highlights

L'expérience Ergo-Robots, expostion "Mathématiques un Dépaysement Soudain", Fondation Cartier, Paris

France Culture (jan. 2012), "La robotique pour mieux comprendre l'homme", Emission Continent Sciences de Stéphane Deligeorges. A propos du contexte scientifique dans lequel s'inscrit le projet Ergo-Robots.

France Inter, (Nov. 2011) "En direct de la Fondation Cartier: Les mystères des mathématiques, et les robots et la curiosité", 3D Le Journal (émission de Stéphane Paoli), France Inter. Podcast

France Inter (Juil. 2011) "Robots, Invasion Imminente ?", On verra ça demain (émission de Daniel Fiévet), France Inter. Podcast

France Culture (Juin 2011) Interview "L'apprentissage des robots", Podcast

Le Monde.Fr (avr. 2011) Reportage sur les interfaces homme-robot et l'utilisation de l'humanoide Nao dans les laboratoires de recherche

France Info (mars 2011)
Interview à propos du robot Acroban
(Communiqué de presse Acroban)

Euronews (aug. 2010)
on Acroban in SIGGRAPH'2010, Los Angeles, USA).)

Science et Vie (2009)
Interview

La Recherche (2008) Interview

Metro (2008)
Interview

France Culture (2006) Interview

Pour la Science (2006) Article "Un robot curieux"

Le Monde (2005)
Des robots remontent aux sources du langage (2005)

Business Week (2005) How This Dog Teaches Itself New Tricks

more press ...

Since january 2008, I am a research scientist in INRIA Bordeaux - Sud-Ouest, heading the FLOWERS team,in developmental and social robotics. Before that, I have been a permanent researcher in Sony Computer Science Lab in Paris for 8 years (2000-2007). I studied computer science in Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, and obtained my PhD in artificial intelligence from University Paris VI. I am interested in the mechanisms that allow humans and robots to develop perceptual, motivational, behavioral and social capabilities to become capable of sharing cultural representations and of natural embodied interaction.

My recent work in developmental and social robotics focuses on sensorimotor development and its interaction with early language development: Can a robot learn like a child ? How can we build robots that can learn a variety of novel reusable skills in initially unknown environments, either throuh autonomous and spontaneous exploration or through interaction with social peers? How can language be discovered and learnt through natural interaction with humans? In this research, concepts from developmental psychology are imported, formalized and implemented in robots. The central hypothesis is that open-ended learning in the real-world can only happen when strong developmental constraints allow to guide the exploration and acquisition of skills. My approach is thus to study various families of constraints essential in human development and apply them to robot development and learning: intrinsic motivation and artificial curiosity, maturational processes, morphological computation and embodiment, social constraints related to imitation learning, emulation, joint attention and joint intention understanding, perceptual and motor primitives, self-organization.

In previous years, I have also used robots to study how new linguistic conventions can be established in a society of individuals, as well as the mechanisms of language acquisition. There is a double objective: 1) contributing to the understanding of the acquisition and evolution of language(s) (see my book), 2) developing new technological approaches for building intelligent sociable robots.

I am also strongly involved in creating strong interactions between science, scientists and society through popular science (vulgarisation scientifique, médiation scientifique), involving regular writing of popular science articles, participation to wide audience radio and tv programs and intervention in the press to address scientific issues, participation to science festivales and museum exhibitions.

News:

New article on active learning of inverse models:
Baranes, A., Oudeyer, P-Y. (in press) Active Learning of Inverse Models with Intrinsically Motivated Goal Exploration in Robots, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, in press.

HBU Workshop 2012: I co-organize the 3rd International Workshop on Human Behaviour Understanding, to be held as a satellite workshop of IEEE/RSJ IROS Conference, to be held in october 2012, Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal.

I was awarded an ERC Starting Grant (project EXPLORERS) from the European Research Council, which will fund a large-scale research project called EXPLORERS over the next 5 years (2010-2014). This project will focus on advanced life-long motor learning in robots as well as on the re-use of learnt motor skills to acquire language. Topics range from intrinsically motivated exploration and learning of motor skills, artificial curiosity, socially-guided robot learning, learning and discovery of body maps, language acquisition. Interested applicants can send me their CV.

My publications on Google Scholar

Selected publications by topics:

Note: some publications appear here in multiple categories.

Intrinsic motivation, artificial curiosity, active learning, exploration in robots and humans

Baranes, A., Oudeyer, P-Y. (in press) Active Learning of Inverse Models with Intrinsically Motivated Goal Exploration in Robots, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, in press.

Oudeyer P-Y, Kaplan , F. and Hafner, V. (2007) Intrinsic Motivation Systems for Autonomous Mental Development, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 11(2), pp. 265--286.DOI: 10.1109/TEVC.2006.890271. (html).

Kaplan F. and Oudeyer P-Y. (2007) In search of the neural circuits of intrinsic motivation, Frontiers in Neuroscience, 1(1), pp.225--236.

Baranes, A., Oudeyer, P-Y. (2011) The Interaction of Maturational Constraints and Intrinsic Motivations in Active Motor Development, in proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL-Epirob) , Frankfurt, Germany.

Baranes, A., Oudeyer, P-Y. (2010) Intrinsically Motivated Goal Exploration for Active Motor Learning in Robots: a Case Study, in Proceedings of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2010), Taipei, Taiwan.

Nguyen, M., Baranes, A., Oudeyer, P-Y. (2011) Bootstrapping Intrinsically Motivated Learning with Human Demonstrations, in proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL-Epirob), Frankfurt, Germany.

Baranes, A., Oudeyer, P-Y. (2009) R-IAC: Robust intrinsically motivated exploration and active learning, IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development, 1(3), pp. 155--169. DOI: 10.1109/TAMD.2009.2037513.

Oudeyer P-Y. and Kaplan F. (2007) What is intrinsic motivation? A typology of computational approaches, Frontiers in Neurorobotics, 1:6, doi: 10.3389/neuro.12.006.2007

Oudeyer P-Y., Kaplan F. (2006) Discovering Communication, Connection Science, 18(2), pp. 189--206.

Kaplan, F. and Oudeyer, P-Y. (2007) The progress-drive hypothesis: an interpretation of early imitation. In Dautenhahn, K. and Nehaniv, C., editor, Models and mechanisms of imitation and social learning: Behavioural, social and communication dimensions, pp. 361--377, Cambridge University Press.

Social learning, imitation learning, interaction learning, robot shaping

Cederborg, T., Oudeyer, P-Y. (2011) Imitating Operations on Internal Cognitive Structures for Language Acquisition, Proceedings of IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (HUMANOIDS 2011), Bled, Slovenia.

Lopes, M., Cederborg, M., Oudeyer, P-Y. (2011) Simultaneous Acquisition of Task and Feedback Models, in proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL-Epirob), Frankfurt, Germany.

Nguyen, M., Baranes, A., Oudeyer, P-Y. (2011) Bootstrapping Intrinsically Motivated Learning with Human Demonstrations, in proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL-Epirob), Frankfurt, Germany.

Cederborg, T., Ming, L., Baranes, A., Oudeyer, P-Y. (2010) Incremental Local Online Gaussian Mixture Regression for Imitation Learning of Multiple Tasks, in Proceedings of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2010), Taipei, Taiwan.

Oudeyer P-Y., Kaplan F. (2006) Discovering Communication, Connection Science, 18(2), pp. 189--206

Kaplan, F. and Oudeyer, P-Y. (2007) The progress-drive hypothesis: an interpretation of early imitation. In Dautenhahn, K. and Nehaniv, C., editor, Models and mechanisms of imitation and social learning: Behavioural, social and communication dimensions, pp. 361--377, Cambridge University Press.

Kaplan, F., Oudeyer, P-Y., Kubinyi, E. and Miklosi, A. (2002) Robotic clicker training. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 38(3-4), pp. 197--206.

Human-robot interaction and interfaces

Oudeyer, P-Y., Ly, O., Rouanet, P. (2011) Exploring robust, intuitive and emergent physical human-robot interaction with the humanoid Acroban, Proceedings of IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (HUMANOIDS 2011), Bled, Slovenia.

Lopes, M., Cederborg, M., Oudeyer, P-Y. (2011) Simultaneous Acquisition of Task and Feedback Models, in proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL-Epirob), Frankfurt, Germany.

Rouanet, P., Danieau, F. and Oudeyer, P-Y. (2011) A robotic game to evaluate interfaces used to show and teach visual objects to a robot in real world condition, In Proceedings of 6th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2011), Lausanne, Switzerland.

Rouanet, P., Oudeyer, P-Y. and Filliat, D. (2009) An integrated system for teaching new visually grounded words to a robot for non-expert users using a mobile device, in the Proceedings of IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (HUMANOIDS 2010), Paris, France.

Oudeyer P-Y. (2003) The production and recognition of emotions in speech: features and algorithms, International Journal in Human-Computer Studies, 59(1-2), pp. 157--183, special issue on Affective Computing.

Morphological computation, embodiment, maturation, humanoid biped walking

Lapeyre, M., Ly, O., Oudeyer, P-Y. (2011) Maturational constraints for motor learning in high-dimensions : the case of biped walking, Proceedings of IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (HUMANOIDS 2011), Bled, Slovenia.

Ly, O., Lapeyre, M., Oudeyer, P-Y. (2011) Bio-inspired vertebral column, compliance and semi-passive dynamics in a lightweight robot, in Proceedings of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2011), San Francisco, US.

Baranes, A., Oudeyer, P-Y. (2011) The Interaction of Maturational Constraints and Intrinsic Motivations in Active Motor Development, in proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL-Epirob) , Frankfurt, Germany.

Discovery and learning of body maps

Schatz, T. and Oudeyer P-Y. (2009) Learning motor dependent Crutchfield's information distance to anticipate changes in the topology of sensori body maps, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Learning and Development, Shangaï, China.

Kaplan, F., Oudeyer, P-Y. (2009) Stable kernels and fluid body envelopes, SICE Journal of Control, Measurement, and System Integration, 48(1).

Self-organization, complex-systems and the evolution of language and speech

Oudeyer, P-Y. (2006) Self-Organization in the Evolution of Speech, Studies in the Evolution of Language, Oxford University Press. (Translation by James R. Hurford)

Oudeyer, P-Y. (2005) The Self-Organization of Speech Sounds, Journal of Theoretical Biology, 233(3), pp. 435--449. (html)

Oudeyer, P-Y. (2005) The self-organization of combinatoriality and phonotactics in vocalization systems, Connection Science, 17(3-4), pp. 325--341

Oudeyer, P-Y. and Kaplan, F. (2007) Language Evolution as a Darwinian Process: Computational Studies, Cognitive Processing, 8(1), pp. 21--35. DOI: 10.1007/s10339-006-0158-3

Oudeyer, P-Y (2005) How phonological structures can be culturally selected for learnability, Adaptive Behavior, 13(4), pp. 269--280.

Language acquisition, developmental speech acquisition, multimodal learning in humans and robots

Kaplan, F., Oudeyer, P-Y., Bergen B. (2008) Computational Models in the Debate over Language Learnability, Infant and Child Development, 17(1), pp. 55--80.

Cederborg, T., Oudeyer, P-Y. (2011) Imitating Operations on Internal Cognitive Structures for Language Acquisition, Proceedings of IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (HUMANOIDS 2011), Bled, Slovenia.

Oudeyer P-Y., Kaplan F. (2006) Discovering Communication, Connection Science, 18(2), pp. 189--206.

Mangin, O., Oudeyer, P-Y., Filliat, D. (2010) A bag-of-features framework for incremental learning of speech invariants in unsegmented audio streams, in Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Epigenetic Robotics, Sweden, 2010.

Emotional speech synthesis and recognition:

Oudeyer P-Y. (2003) The production and recognition of emotions in speech: features and algorithms, International Journal in Human-Computer Studies , 59(1-2), pp. 157--183, special issue on Affective Computing. 

Epistemology and history of developmental and cognitive robotics:

Oudeyer, P-Y. (2011) Developmental Robotics, Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning, N.M. Seel ed., Springer Reference Series, Springer.

Oudeyer, P-Y. (2010) On the impact of robotics in behavioral and cognitive sciences: from insect navigation to human cognitive development, IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development, 2(1), pp. 2--16. DOI: 10.1109/TAMD.2009.2039057 

Kaplan, F., Oudeyer, P-Y. (2008) Le corps comme variable expérimentale, Revue Philosophique de la France et de l'Etranger, pp. 287--298.

Complete list of publications

NEWS: Keynotes talks about the main challenges of developmental robotics I made in 2011 in the following conferences: Robolift 2011, IEEE Alife 2011 and AAMAS 2011

Acroban results from the collaboration between INRIA and University of Bordeaux I/Labri.

More information on http://flowers.inria.fr/acroban.php

See also our new Inria FLOWERS Youtube Channel.

Together with Manuel Lopes, I have guest edited in 2010 a special issue on active learning and intrinsically motivated exploration in robots for the IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development journal.

I am editor of the IEEE CIS Newsletter on Autonomous Mental Development. The latest issue includes a dialog on Intrinsically Motivated Learning in robots.

I was program co-chair of the 9th International Conference on Epigenetic Robotics: Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems (2009), which took place in Venice, Italy.

my book is available at Oxford University Press:

Oudeyer, P-Y. (2006) Self-Organization in the Evolution of Speech, Studies in the Evolution of Language, Oxford University Press. (Translation by James R. Hurford) bibtex reference

I have co-organized in 2006 the 6th International Conference on Epigenetic Robotics:  Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems which took place in Paris.

Starting from our work in developmental robotics, Frédéric Kaplan worked with ECAL for the project "A robot's playroom"

I received the Prix ASTI 2005 for my research on the origins of speech.
 

I received the Prix Le Monde de la Recherche Universitaire    in 2004 for my research on the origins of speech.
 

PROJECTS HIGHLIGHTS

Developmental Robotics and   Artificial Curiosity

Modeling The Evolution of Speech Sounds

Emotional Speech Synthesis

Natural Human-robot Interaction

Language Acquisition in Robots