User:Jean-Philippe de Lespinay/Jean-Philippe de Lespinay 2

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Jean-Philippe de Lespinay (born June 19, 1946) is a French entrepreneur and inventor. He is known for his invention "La Maieutique", part of Artificial Intelligence, made in 1986 and for his reasoning expert systems. He received in February 2017 the awards.ai price in the category "AI achievement".

Biography

Jean-Philippe de Lespinay was born in Paris. He comes from an old French aristocratic family dating from the 13th century which has been active on several occasions in history : Jean_de_Lespinay Jean de Lespinay, Treasurer of the Duchy of Brittany in the 15th century, Louis-Armand de Lespinay (a general of Napoléon), Zénobe de Lespinay, Member of Parliament of Vendée and mayor of Chantonnay. After his baccalauréat, he awarded in 1971 the diploma from the Business School of Marseille, now Euromed. In 1973 he qualified as a sales engineer in computer science at Honeywell Bull company. Of his marriage in 1977, he has four children. In 1986 he founded A.R.C.A.N.E., a private R & D company in Artificial Intelligence he ran until 1996. In 1999, he founded TREE LOGIC with venture capital, a start-up he runs up to 2002, created to market an intelligent computer interface coming from his research: "Tiara".

He implemented the principles of Artificial Intelligence (AI) expressed 15 years earlier by McCarthy, Minsky and Turing, in Mycin for example, solving a major problem in AI and computing: knowledge engineering. He invented an easy solution for knowledge extraction: "La Maieutique", he associates with a reasoning mechanism, preconditions for an intelligent, conversational and learning computer, able to dialogue with users. In 1991, due to the results of his R&D work he was awarded a « Research Technician degree in Artificial Intelligence" from the French Ministry of Research. This recognition is valuable because Jean-Philippe de Lespinay has a particularity: he conducts research in advanced computer science without being computer scientist and has made the developments by his own team of programmers. This allows it to be probably the only one to have produced an AI that is simple enough to be usable by the general public. It is sold in companies to non-computer user services. From 1986 to 2000, he continued his research and made several other discoveries in Artificial Intelligence, all based on automated reasoning. In 1999 It obtains the label FCPI for innovative French companies after expertise of his prototype Tiara, an intelligent, conversational and vocal interface allowing to use computers without keyboard, without mouse and without screen, ie by voice. In 2001, he develops T.Rex ("Tree Rules Extractor") for non-computer scientists, an application generator (ie a general-purpose programming tool) in natural language derived from Maïeutica.

But Jean-Philippe de Lespinay has never been supported by grants, funding or public support for innovation, as his technology is not much appreciated in the academic environment that constitutes the juries and in the world of Computer that buys software. Indeed, his technology aims to make disappear computer scientists and the computer as it is today. He was able to hold only because of his talent as a commercial and communicator, his faith in his invention. Its company is only financed by its turnover and the capital that investors want to bring. The "subprime crisis" put investors to fly, he has no capitals and must file for bankruptcy in 2002.

In 2017 he is 70 years old and receives the [1] for the success of his career in AI ("AI achievement category"),in his new company Tree Logic.

Professional and scientific background

Jean-Philippe de Lespinay began his career as a sales engineer at Honeywell Bull (1973). In 1982, he joined a computer engineering company, Cril, as Commercial Director. Artificial Intelligence (AI), was still in its infancy at that time but promising to make computers more intelligent, more efficient. In 1986, he created A.R.C.A.N.E. (an acronym for “Automatisation du Raisonnement et de la Connaissance, Acquisition Normalisée de l’Expertise” ) to provide French companies with expert systems instead of just IT. At the time, expert systems were prototypes developed by large companies, most of them in the United States (IntelliCorp, TecKnowledge, Lisp Machine, etc.).

At Arcane he made a discovery: there exists a method allowing any employee to develop expert systems out of IT departments, in a fast and efficient way. He named this method "La Maieutique" in reference to Socrates maieutics. La Maieutique represents visually the know-how of experts in the form of decision trees in everyday language which it automatically extracts their underlying knowledge in the form of expert systems.

Mid-1986, for a French bank, the Banque de Bretagne, he produced the expert system Josephine (1000 rules and several external programs), developed by a former bank employee with virtually no knowledge of computing and Artificial Intelligence: Michel Le Séac'h. This employee reported this experience, and more, in a book. An industry first because at this time - as today in 2011 - development of experts systemes was a complex, long and expensive procedure requiring whole teams of IT specialists. Other innovation, Josephine dialogued with the end user on-premise. As it was installed in bank agencies to be available to clients, journalists could test it incognito, which leads to some bad articles in the press. Following this difficulties, Josephine was abandoned in 1989.

In the following years, Jean-Philippe de Lespinay gradually generalized his theory on the power of automated reasoning. In 1988, his company developed Moca, an universal reasoning engine for sale giving explanations and detecting contradictions. In 1990, he demonstrated the reliability of La Maieutique with "Maïeutica", a software fully automating the method. With Maieutica, he developed expert systems for French organizations (Createst, Exportest, Aloes, Soudfe, etc.)

In 1991, he invented the "Flow Logic", a logic based on 5 dedicated laws of fault diagnosis, automated in a new expert system generator: MIAO (Intelligently Assisted Computer Maintenance). Miao reasoned on plans. It "understands" the schema of a machine (or system) described through its components represented by decision grids, deduces the possibilities of failures and how to diagnose them, as an engineer knows how to do it by reading a plan. Miao therefore presents the originality of producing expert systems without interviewing experts, sometimes to help in the design of complex machines. It is sold to French major industrialists (Merlin Gérin, ACB Cersa, Ministère de la Défense, etc.) and to administrations (National Education).

From 1992, he generalized in various publications his theory by stating that La Maieutique allows people with no training in IT to develop any program, not just expert systems. In July 1999, he created a Startup company, TREE LOGIC, with the help of venture capital and business angels in order to realize an intelligent and vocal chatterbot intended to act as an operating system of which he developed a running prototype, "Tiara". He obtained for 3 years the French "FCPI" (or Fond commun de placement for innovation) label, granted to small and medium enterprises. In 2001, Tree Logic developed T.Rex ("Tree Rules Extractor"), an application generator in natural language derivative of Maieutica intended for non-computer scientists.

Publications

• Les Echos about La Maieutique and a new job, "Maieutician": "Artificial Intelligence at home" (July 11, 1986)
• Science et Vie Article about Artificial Intelligence state of art: "IA: From total zero to Zero Plus" (May 1991)
• Admiroutes: Reasoning IA (December 2008)
• Automates Intelligents: Conversationnel and Call centers (2009)
• Admiroutes: Robotics and artificial consciousness (2009)
• Robot Maker: IT today : 9 defects of procedural
• Database European research: Presentation of Tiara project
• "The "Flow Logic""
• Bancatique: "Programming accessible to all" (1992)
• IX-Magazine: "Decision support fot those who do not know" (1995)
• Decidis: "Save the know how of companies" (1995)
• International Days for Artificial Intelligence (Paris): conference "The seven advantages of expert systems" (1987)
• Homeai.info : A MASS-MARKET ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (April 22, 2017)