Jean-Philippe de Lespinay

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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"^[1], part of the Artificial Intelligence, made in 1986^[2][3][4] and for his reasoning expert systems.

Contents [hide] 1 Biography 2 Professional and scientific background 3 Publications 4 References

Biography

Jean-Philippe de Lespinay was born in Paris. After his baccalauréat, he graduated in 1971 from the Business School of Marseilles, now Euromed^[5]. In 1973 he qualified as a sales engineer in computer science at Honeywell Bull company. In 1986 he founded A.R.C.A.N.E.^[6], a private R & D company in Artificial Intelligence he ran until 1996. In 1999, he founded TREE LOGIC^[7] with venture capital, a start-up he runs up to 2002, created to market an intelligent computer interface coming from his research: TIARA^[8]. He implemented the principles of Artificial Intelligence (AI) expressed 15 years earlier, with Mycin for example, solving a major problem in AI: knowledge engineering.^[9][10] He invented an easy solution for knowledge extraction: LA MAIEUTIQUE, he associates with a reasoning mechanism, preconditions for an intelligent and learning computer. 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.^[11] Subsequently, he generalized the concept by making several new discoveries in Artificial Intelligence all based on automated reasoning.

Of his marriage in 1977,^[12] he had four children. He divorced in 2007.

Professional and scientific background

He 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” ^[13]) 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^[14] (IntelliCorp^[15], 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"^[16] 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)^[17], 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^[18]. 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^[19]. 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^[20]. Following this difficulties, Josephine was abandoned in 1989^[21].

In the following years, Jean-Philippe de Lespinay gradually generalized his theory on the power of automated reasoning. In 1988, his company developed Moca,^[22] an universal reasoning engine for sale giving explanations and detecting contradictions. In 1990, he demonstrated the reliability of La Maieutique with "Maïeutica",^[23][24] a software fully automating the method. With Maieutica, he developed expert systems for French organizations (Createst, Exportest, Aloes, Soudfe, etc.)^[25]

In 1991, he invented the "Flow Logic", demonstrating with his software MIAO^[26](Maintenance Intelligently Assisted by Computer) that this logic was operational. Thanks to the reasoning, Miao could understand the blueprint of a machine, to deduce every potential failure and how to diagnose each of them, as an engineer would do. Thus, MIAO produced expert systems in fault diagnosis without the knowledge of experts of the machine, sometimes to help in the design of complex machines^[27][28].

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.^[29][30]

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"^[31]. He obtained for 3 years the French "FCPI" (or Fond commun de placement for innovation) label^[32], 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^[33].

Jean-Philippe de Lespinay authored several articles including a 16-page report^[34] on the state of the art in Artificial Intelligence for the French popular science magazine Science et Vie, thesis on reasoning Artificial Intelligence and artificial consciousness with La Maieutique, etc.

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)
• Larousse encyclopedia: Definition of the expert system
• Larousse encyclopedia: Definition of Artificial Intelligence
• 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)

References

Persondata
Name	de Lespinay, Jean-Philippe
Alternative names
Short description	La Maieutique inventor
Date of birth	June 19, 1946
Place of birth	Paris
Date of death
Place of death