Michel Parent: Professional Outline

Michel Parent is currently the program director at INRIA of the R&D team on automated vehicles (IMARA research group). He is also the program coordinator of the European project CyberCars (http://www.cybercars.org). This new program is issued in part from his research about a novel public transportation system based on small automated electric cars which he proposed in 1991 and which lead to Praxitele, the first large scale experimentation of station-cars. Based on his initial concept, Michel Parent lead the development at INRIA of a new type of vehicle called the CyCab which includes drive-by-wire and automatic driving and is now manufactured by Robosoft, a start-up company.

Michel Parent has spent half of his time in research and academia at such places as Stanford University and MIT in the USA and INRIA in France, and the other half in industry where he was the leading scientist in two SME involved in automation projects. He is the author of several books on robotics and vision, and numerous publications and patents.

Michel Parent has an engineering degree from the French Aeronautics School (ENSAE), a Masters degree in Operation Research and a Ph.D. in Computer Science, both from Case Western Reserve University, USA.