Philippe Gaussier was born in 1967 in Marseille, France. He received the M.S. degree in electronic from Aix-Marseille University in 1989. In 1992, he received a Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Paris XI (Orsay) for a work on the modelization and simulation of a visual system inspired by mammals vision. From 1992 to 1994, he conduced research in Neural Network (NN) applications and in control of autonomous mobile robots at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (LAMI). From 1994 to 1998, he was assistant professor at the ENSEA. He is now Professor at the Cergy-Pontoise University in France and leads the neurocybernetic team of the Image and Signal processing Lab (ETIS). Robots are used as tools to study in "real life" conditions the coherence and the dynamics of different cognitive models (ecological and developmental perspective). New models can then be proposed and lead to new neurobiological or psychological experiments. Currently, his works are focused on one hand on the modelization of the cognitive mechanisms involved in visual perception, motivated navigation, action selection and on the other hand on the study of the dynamical interactions between individuals (imitation capabilities, social interactions, collective intelligence...).
More precisely, his research interests include the modelization of the hippocampus and its relations with prefrontal cortex, the basal ganglia and other cortical structures like parietal, temporal areas. He is also working on an empirical formalism to analyze and compare different cognitive architectures. This formalism is applied to study the dynamics of the interactions between autonomous systems and their development. Current robotic applications include autonomous and on-line learning for motivated visual navigation (place learning, visual homing, object discremination...) and imitation games.