Intelligent Behavior Depends on the Ecological Niche

Excerpt

Pierre–Yves Oudeyer is a research director at Inria and head of the Flowers lab at Inria, Univ. Bordeaux and Ensta-ParisTech since 2008. The Flowers team hosts around 25 researchers at the crossroads of AI, machine learning, developmental robotics and cognitive sciences. From 1999 until 2007, he was a permanent researcher in Sony Computer Science Laboratory. He studies developmental autonomous learning and the self-organization of behavioral and cognitive structures in humans and machines. In particular, he studies exploration in large open-ended spaces, with a focus on autonomous goal setting, intrinsically motivated learning, and how this can automate curriculum learning. With his team, he pioneered curiosity-driven learning algorithms working in real world robots (used in Sony Aibo and Qrio humanoid robots), and showed how the same algorithms can be used to personalize sequences of learning activities in educational technologies deployed at large in schools. He developed theoretical frameworks to understand better human curiosity and its role in cognitive development, and contributed to build an international interdisciplinary research community on human curiosity. He also studied how machines and humans can invent, learn and evolve speech communication systems. …