Frederic Kaplan graduated as an engineer of the Ecole Nationale Superieur des Telecommunications in Paris and received a PhD degreee in Artificial Intelligence from the University Paris VI. He works ten years as a researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris and supervises now a new team on interactif furniture at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL).

Among other things, he has been exploring technologies permitting to endow objects with a personal history so that they become different as we interact them and to learn from one another, thus creating a ecosystem in perpetual evolution. In parallel with his research in artificial intelligence, he collaborates with developmental psychologists, ethologists, neuroscientists, linguists, designers and architects.

His pluridisciplinary researches have been published in various scientific journals from Robotics and Autonomous Systems to Behavioral Processes. He authored two books "La naissance d'une langue chez les robots" (the birth of a language among robots) (Hermes, 2001) and "Les machines apprivoisees: comprendre les robots de loisir" (Tamed machines: understanding entertainment robots) (Vuibert, 2005)