Jacques Pitrat (born in Feb. 1934, died in Oct. 2019) was one of the French

symbolic artificial intelligence Symbolic may refer to: * Symbol, something that represents an idea, a process, or a physical entity Mathematics, logic, and computing * Symbolic computation, a scientific area concerned with computing with mathematical formulas * Symbolic dynamic ...

pioneers. He developed

knowledge based system A knowledge-based system (KBS) is a computer program that reasons and uses a knowledge base to solve complex problems. Knowledge-based systems were the focus of early artificial intelligence researchers in the 1980s. The term can refer to a br ...

expert system In artificial intelligence (AI), an expert system is a computer system emulating the decision-making ability of a human expert. Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning through bodies of knowledge, represented mainly as ...

s, and theorem provers, and was a strong advocate of meta-knowledge based systems. Graduated from

École Polytechnique (, ; also known as Polytechnique or l'X ) is a ''grande école'' located in Palaiseau, France. It specializes in science and engineering and is a founding member of the Polytechnic Institute of Paris. The school was founded in 1794 by mat ...

, and member of the

Corps de l'armement The Corps de l'armement (), or Corps des ingénieurs de l'armement () is a Technical Grand Corps of the French State (''grand corps de l'Etat'' ), aimed at providing the French Armed Forces with all appropriate Military technology, equipment and su ...

, he began his career at the Laboratoire Central de l'Armement (French equivalent of

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adva ...

) from 1959 to 1967. In 1966 he defended his Habilitation thesis (

Doctorat d'État Habilitation is the highest university degree, or the procedure by which it is achieved, in Germany, France, Italy, Poland and some other European and non-English-speaking countries. The candidate fulfills a university's set criteria of excellen ...

) about a theorem proving software using meta-theorems. He worked at the

CNRS The French National Centre for Scientific Research (, , CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,637 staff, including 11,137 tenured researchers, 13,415 eng ...

from 1967 till his retirement, ending his career as emeritus research director at the end of 2015. He taught

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

at the

Université Pierre et Marie Curie Pierre and Marie Curie University ( , UPMC), also known as Paris VI, was a public research university in Paris, France, from 1971 to 2017. The university was located on the Jussieu Campus in the Latin Quarter of the 5th arrondissement of Paris, ...

in Paris from 1967 till 1998. He was elected an

AAAI Fellow Fellowship of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (abbreviated as AAAI Fellow or FAAAI) is an award granted to individuals that the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), judged to have made ...

in 1994.

Published books

* ''Réalisation de programmes de démonstration de théorèmes utilisant des méthodes heuristiques''. Thesis, 1966. * ''Un programme de démonstration de théorèmes. Monographies d'informatique de l'AFCET''. Dunod. 1970. * ''Textes, ordinateurs et compréhension.'' Eyrolles. 1985. Translated to English : ''An artificial approach to understanding natural language.'' North Oxford Academic (Grande-Bretagne) et GP Publishing (USA) 1988. * ''Métaconnaissance, Futur de l'Intelligence Artificielle''. Hermès. 1990. * ''Penser autrement l'informatique.'' Hermès. 1993. * ''De la machine à l'intelligence''. Hermès. 1995. * ''Artificial Beings - The conscience of a conscious machine'' ISTE, Wiley, Mars 2009.

References

Web resources

* French wikipedia page about Jacques Pitrat
LIP6 page

Bootstrapping Artificial Intelligence blog

Seminar (march 2020, in French) in honor of Jacques Pitrat
* French wikipage (more detailed) about Jacques Pitrat * an open source softwar
AI system
inspired by Pitrat
RefPerSys
- REFlexive PERsistent SYStem)
the self-generated source code of CAIA, the last software created by Jacques Pitrat
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pitrat, Jacques 1934 births 2019 deaths French computer scientists Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence