Jacques Pitrat (born in Feb. 1934, died in Oct. 2019) was one of the French symbolic artificial intelligence pioneers. He developed knowledge based systems, expert systems, and theorem provers, and was a strong advocate of meta-knowledge based systems. Graduated from

École Polytechnique École may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région Île-de-France * École, Savoi ...

, 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 equipment and at supervising the French ...

, he began his career at the Laboratoire Central de l'Armement (French equivalent of DARPA) 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 many European countries. The candidate fulfills a university's set criteria of excellence in research, teaching and further education, usually including a ...

) about a theorem proving software using meta-theorems. He worked a
CNRS
from 1967 till his retirement, ending his career as emeritus research director at end of 2015. He taught

Artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

Université Pierre et Marie Curie Pierre and Marie Curie University (french: link=no, Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, UPMC), also known as Paris 6, was a public research university in Paris, France, from 1971 to 2017. The university was located on the Jussieu Campus in the La ...

in Paris from 1967 till 1998.

Published books

* ''Réalisation de programmes de démonstration de théorèmes utilisant des méthodes heuristiques''. Thèse 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.

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
a software AI system inspired by Pitrat
(RefPerSys)
the self-generated source code of CAIA, the last software created by Jacques Pitrat
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pitrat, Jacques 1934 births 2019 deaths French computer scientists