Robert M. French

Timeline

1. 1969–1985

   Mathematics degrees and translation

   He earns a B.S. in mathematics at Miami University in 1972 and an M.A. at Indiana University in 1974. From 1976 to 1985, he works as a translator and interpreter in Paris; with Jacqueline Henry, he translates Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach into French in 1985.

2. 1985–1995

   Doctoral study and research posts

   At the University of Michigan, he begins graduate study in computer science in 1985 and completes a Ph.D. with Douglas Hofstadter on artificial intelligence and cognitive science in 1992. He holds a postdoctoral fellowship at Indiana University’s Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition in 1992 and serves as a visiting assistant professor in computer science at Willamette from 1992 to 1994. From 1994 to 1995, he is a postdoctoral fellow in the University of Wisconsin’s Department of Psychology.

3. 1995–1998

   The Tabletop analogy model

   He publishes The Subtlety of Sameness: A Theory and Computer Model of Analogy-Making in 1995; its Tabletop program forms analogies from everyday objects arranged for a meal. He joins the University of Liège’s Department of Psychology as a research scientist in 1995 and becomes an associate professor in 1998.

4. 1998–2004

   A Liège professorship and book

   At the University of Liège, he serves as an associate professor of quantitative psychology and cognitive science from 1998 to 2000, then becomes a professor in 2001. He co-edits Implicit Learning and Consciousness with Axel Cleeremans in 2002, a collection about learning without conscious awareness and computational models. He holds the professorship through 2004.

5. 2004–2005

   CNRS and a learning project

   He joins CNRS as a research director in 2004. He coordinates the European Commission’s Basic Mechanisms of Learning and Forgetting in Natural and Artificial Systems project, which is completed in 2005.

6. 2011–2012

   TRACX and the Turing Test

   As a cognitive scientist working with connectionist models, he coauthors TRACX, a framework for sequence segmentation and chunk extraction, in 2011. In his 2012 essay Moving Beyond the Turing Test, he argues that computers can serve as high-level information sources that people interact with.

7. 2023

   TRACX2 for melody perception

   In 2023, he coauthors A Recurrent Connectionist Model of Melody Perception: An Exploration Using TRACX2, a study of a connectionist model for melody perception.

8. As of October 2026

   OPRE and CNRS emeritus role

   In a preprint submitted in 2025 and revised in July 2026, he coauthors OPRE, an online dataset-compression algorithm that uses two input-space criteria. With a randomly initialized classifier at test time, OPRE matches reported results for online continual-learning methods on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, and outperforms GDumb at the same memory budget. As of October 2026, he is an emeritus research director at CNRS’s LEAD laboratory at Université Bourgogne Europe.