Jean-Christophe Baillie joined ENSTA ParisTech after his PhD in 2001. There, he founded the Cognitive Robotics Lab to focus the research activity of ENSTA on developmental robotics, using mostly Aibo robots from Sony. The core research was centered on trying to understand the dynamics that could lead robots to develop their own language, building on research originally done by Luc Steels at Sony Computer Science Lab. Particular efforts were made to ground perceptual categories into sensorimotor experiences, taking inspiration from research made by J. Kevin O'Regan. Sophisticated robots like the Aibo, integrating many degrees of freedom and sensors, needed advanced programming and there was no ready-to-use solution at the time. Robots often require parallel programming and event-based programming, which became the core features implemented in early versions of URBI, a programming language developed by Baillie to answer these needs. Another aspect of Urbi, which was central to its design, was the desire to make robot programming easier, in particular for students who did not have enough time to learn C++ libraries during short projects.
Gostai
In March 2006, Jean-Christophe Baillie founded Gostai, a startup dedicated to further developing the Urbi technology. The company renamed the Urbi language into urbiscript, and Urbi became a generic robotics middleware in C++, using urbiscript as its orchestration technology. It is now open source and available here: https://github.com/urbiforge/urbi In 2008, Gostai released a first version of GostaiNet, a cloud-based robotics architecture designed to allow low-cost robots to benefit from significant remote computational power in order to run AI-based algorithms. Later in 2010, Gostai released the :fr:Jazz |Jazz robot, dedicated to mobile telepresence. Jazz was based on Urbi and GostaiNet technologies. It started to be sold for hospitals services and museum applications, as well as an academic research platform. In 2012, Aldebaran Robotics acquired Gostai, which was combined with the main company. Jean-Christophe Baillie stayed two years at Aldebaran, where he founded the Aldebaran AI Lab to continue his work on developmental robotics and the evolution of language.
Novaquark
Jean-Christophe Baillie had been working for several years on a project of large-scale virtual world inspired by massively multiplayer games and allowing players to create their own economy, political or territorial systems, as well as social organizations. This project called Dual Universe became a startup company, Novaquark, in January 2014. The company is active in developing the project and plans to release a first alpha version in September 2017.
Public activities
Jean-Christophe Baillie makes regular appearances as an expert in artificial intelligence and robotics on French TV and radio programs, and as a speaker in international conferences. He received the Pierre Faure award from the École Polytechnique in 2007, the ACES Microsoft ICT Award in 2009, and the SEE/IEEE Glavieux Award in 2013.
