Claude F. Touzet

Claude TOUZET, Professor
Cognitive and Sensory Neuroscience Lab.
Aix Marseille University
Centre St Charles - Pôle 3C - Case B
3, Place Victor Hugo
13331 Marseille Cedex 03, FRANCE
Mobile : +33 782 91 03 19
claude.touzet@univ-amu.fr

I am professor of Cognitive Science at Aix-Marseille Université (AMU) since 2001 in the "Sensory and Cognitive Rehabilitation" team of the "Sensory and Cognitive Neurosciences Lab" - where I devoted much of my time to develop and test brain training tools for cognitively impaired patients (such as Alzheimer or Cranial Trauma). I received numerous honors (including the 2008 Innovation National Prize of the National Intellectual Property Institute) for this work. I was an invited researcher at CESAR-ORNL, USA, 1997-1999) working on the learning of cooperation for a group of robots. My (Computer Science) doctorate thesis subject (1990) was on learning sequences with artificial neural networks. I also hold a Master Degree in Neurosciences (1985).

The "Sensory and Cognitive Rehabilitation" team focus its research on the inter-actions between the cognitive and sensory-motor functions at various organizational levels (multi-sensory bases of cognitive representations of the body and space, cognitive and neurobiological mechanisms associated to cerebral dysfunction and cognitive restoration, cognitive influences over sensory and motor processes, aging and clinical applications), combining plural-disciplinary approaches (behavior, neuroimaging, neurophysiology, neurology, oto-neurology, modelization and simulation).

Teaching : Licence & Master courses in Cognitive Science
  - Epistemology in Cognitive Science,
  - Computer Science for Neurosciences,
  - Adaptative systems and learning,
  - Artificial neural networks,
  - Natural cognition / Artificial cognition.

Research

In 2014, I published a second volume related to the Theory of neural Cognition. This theory synthesizes and resumes my research activities of the last 25 years. The Theory of neural Cognition (TnC) claims that our brain does not process information, but represents information - we are only a crystallization of our interactions with the environment. TnC explains how each and every one of our cognitive abilities is implemented by, or through, a set of cortical maps - including consciousness. Since TnC refers explicitly to the eliminative materialism paradigm, these explanations - despite being quite simple - are neither popular, nor widespread.
- Interview and companion article describing (quickly) the TnC published by International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems (2014 & 2015).

Journals

S. Khalfa and C. Touzet, "EMDR therapy mechanisms explained by the Theory of neural Cognition", J Trauma Stress Disor Treat, accepted on Nov. 14, 2017.
C. Touzet, "Cognitive fatigue: an impaired cortical inhibitory replenishment", Brain Injury, 8:1-7, 2017. doi:10.1080/02699052.2017.1344300
C. Touzet, "Morvan's syndrome and the sustained absence of all sleep rhythms for months or years: an hypothesis", Med. Hypotheses, 94:51-54, 2016.
C. Touzet, "Sleep: the hebbian reinforcement of the local inhibitory synapses", Med. Hypotheses, 85:359-364, 2015.doi:10.1016/j.mehy.2015.06.013
C. Touzet, "The Theory of neural Cognition applied to Robotics", International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 12:74, 2015. doi: 10.5772/60693.
Glotin, H., P. Warnier, F. Dandurand, S. Dufau, Lété, B., Touzet, C., Ziegler J.C., and Granger, J. A., "An Adaptive Resonance Theory Account of the Implicit Learning of Orthographic Word Forms", Special Issue of J. Physiol, vol. 104, no1-2, pp. 19-26, 2010.
S. Dufau, Lété, B., Touzet, C., Glotin, H., Ziegler J.C., and Grainger, J. A., "Developmental Perspective on Visual Word Recognition: New Evidence and a Self-Organizing Model", European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 22: 5, 669 — 694, 2010.
V. Paban, C. Chambon, C. Manrique, C. Touzet and B. Alescio-Lautier, "Neurotrophic signaling molecules associated with cholinergic damage in young and aged rats - Environmental enrichment as potential therapeutic agent", Neurobiology of Aging, 2009 Apr 22. [Epub ahead of print].
Alescio-Lautier B., Michel B., Herrera C., Elhamadi A., Chamgood, C., Touzet C., Paban V., "Visual and visuospatial short-term memory in mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer disease : role of attention", Neuropsychologia, 45: 1948-1960, 2007.
C. Touzet, "Modeling and Simulation of Elementary Robot Behaviors using Associative Memories", International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, Vol 3 n° 2, June 2006.
C. Touzet, "Distributed Lazy Q-learning for Cooperative Mobile Robots," International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, Vol. 1, No. 1, January 2004, pp. 5-13.
C. Touzet, "Robot Awareness in Cooperative Mobile Robot Learning," Autonomous Robots, Vol. 8 , No. 1, January 2000, pp. 87-97.
J. M. Santos & C. Touzet, "Exploration Tuned Reinforcement Function," Neurocomputing, Vol. 28 , No. 1-3, September 1999, pp. 93-105.
C. Touzet, "Neural Reinforcement Learning for Behaviour Synthesis," Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Special issue on Learning Robot: the New Wave, N. Sharkey Guest Editor, Vol. 22, No. 3-4, December 1997, pp 251-281.

Tutorials

December 8th, 2015, Cape Town, South Africa, SSCI 2015 (IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence). I gave a tutorial entitled: "The Theory of Neuronal Cognition".
September 23rd-25th, 2014, Ile de Porquerolles, Var, France, ERMITES 2014 (IX Summer School for advanced studies in Multimodal Information Retrieval). I gave a 3-hours tutorial entitled: "Cognition Neural Theory & Reading".
July 16th-19th, 2014, Brisbane, Australia, ASCC 2014 (Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness). I gave a 3-hours tutorial entitled: "Theory of Neuronal Cognition and Consciousness".

Books (in French)

C. Touzet, Hypnose, sommeil, placebo ? Les réponses de la Théorie neuronale de la Cognition - Tome 2, 166 pages, éd. la Machotte, 2014.
C. Touzet, Conscience, intelligence, libre-arbitre ? Les réponses de la Théorie neuronale de la Cognition - Tome 1, 156 pages, éd. la Machotte, 2010.
C. Touzet, Les réseaux de neurones artificiels : introduction au connexionnisme, 150 pages, Préface de Jeanny Hérault, EC2 éd., Paris, 1992.

Book chapters (selection)

C. Touzet, C. Kermorvant, & H. Glotin, "A Biologically Plausible SOM Representation of the Orthographic Form of 50,000 French Words", in: Villmann, Th., Schleif, F.-M., Kaden, M., Lange, M. (Eds.) Advances in Self-Organizing Maps and Learning Vector Quantization, Springer AISC 295, pp. 303-312, 2014.
C. Touzet, "Why Neurons are Not the Right Level of Abstraction for Implementing Cognition", in A. Chella, R. Pirrone, K. Jóhannsdóttir, R. Sorbello (Eds.) Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures 2012: Proceedings of the Third Annual meeting of the BICA Society, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 196, Springer, pp. 317-318, 2013.
C. Touzet (2011). The Illusion of Joy. In J. Schmidhuber, K.R. Thórisson, and M. Looks (Eds.). Artificial General Intelligence 2011. Springer-Verlag LNAI 6830, pp. 357–362.
C. Touzet, "Q-learning for robots", The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks (Second Edition), M. Arbib editor, MIT Press, 2003, pp. 934-937.
L. E. Parker, C. Touzet, and F. Fernandez, "Techniques for Learning in Multi-Robot Teams," Robot Teams: From Diversity to Polymorphism, Tucker Balch and Lynne E. Parker (eds.), Natick, MA, 2002.
L. E. Parker and C. Touzet, "Multi-Robot Learning in a Cooperative Observation Task," Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems 4, Lynne E. Parker, George Bekey, and Jacob Barhen (eds.), Springer, 2000:391-401.

Conferences (selection)

Bluche T., Kermorvant C., Touzet C. and Glotin H. Cortical-Inspired Open-Bigram Representation for Handwritten Word Recognition. ICDAR 2017 (14th IAPR International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition), Kyoto, Japan, November 13-15, 2017.
Touzet C.(2011). Expected cortical measurements in the context of the Theory of neural Cognition. 31st European Winter Conference on Brain Research, les 2 Alpes, France.
Dufau, S., Grainger, J., Ziegler, J., Touzet, C., Lété, B. & Glotin, H.(2007). Self-Organized Learning of Orthographic Representations. Proceedings of the XVth Conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCOP 2007), Marseille, France.
C. Touzet, P. Demoulin, B. Burle, F. Vidal and F. Macar, "Neuromimetic model of interval timing," Proceedings of the 13th European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks, Bruges, B, 2005, pp. 393-398.

Patents

C. Touzet et B. Alescio-Lautier, Système de mesure et de stimulation de l'activité neurologique, brevet INPI n°2902917 du 28 décembre 2007.
F. Lémann et C. Touzet, Procédé d'analyse comportementale, Brevet INPI FR2875040 du 10/03/2006. Extension PCT n° 40808.

CD-Roms

B. Alescio-Lautier et C. Touzet, memo-Technik : programme d'entraînement de la mémoire et de l'attention, (40 ans et +), Mind Autonomy Research éd., 2009. Also available in Spanish.
B. Alescio-Lautier et C. Touzet, Atelier memo-Technik : boite à outils logicielle pour la stimulation cognitive, (Professionnels), Mind Autonomy Research éd., 2010. Also available in German and Greek.

Distinctions

UE expert for FP7 (Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development. This is the EU's main instrument for funding research in Europe (2007-2013).
2008 National Award for Innovation from the French patent agency.
I lead a team of 4 students who win the French national competition organized by Apple “An intelligent behavior program” (we got a prize worth 50,000 $US in Apple products, with ANTROID: a simulation of a six legged ant that learns by RL how to walk, whatever happens to one of more of its legs).

Last update: C. Touzet - 04/05/2018