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Jean-Marie ChauvetBio
Mr Chauvet, is a Graduate of Ecole polytechnique, Corps des télécommunications, Paris, France (1980-85).
Initiation of a younger Mr Chauvet to the Great Mystery of
Programming originally took place at the since forgotten SICOB and,
even more vividly, at the Lamartine bookshop, with the revelation of
compact, early HP programmable calculators. This HP-25 "HPiphany" was
followed by an offering of its derived model, the overwhelming HP-29c
(the "c" standing for continuous memory!). A model he cherished all
these years and, to this day, still lays in perfect working order, in
the top drawer of his desk.
The momentous upgrade, in the late seventies, to a capacious 4K-memory TRS-80 induced early onset of high-tech mysticism. Enthralling explorations with Z80 assembly code and engrossing experimentations in BASIC fiercely ensued. Inspired by the epochal Lunar Lander, Hamurabi and other Wumpus, Mr Chauvet took on to write a few BASIC games of his own, which, to his utmost surprise, he managed to sell to unsuspecting fellow hobbyists; he happily turned into an instant thousandaire. Teaming with college-mate Alain Rappaport, in what turned out to be an enlightening collaboration over the years, he put totally inconsiderate efforts into producing abstruse BASIC code for a computational model of evolutionary divergence based on the cytochrome C protein. A Moment of Glory, namely a Philips Scientific Award, rewarded their endeavour. A few years later, Mr Chauvet, formally a Navy Officer now, reading maths and physics at Polytechnique, resists the academic insistence on him learning FORTRAN and choose to dwelve on the subtle delicacies of APL instead. Mr Chauvet finds out that the APL rendition of the preceding evolutionary divergence program is seducively more compact and obfuscated than the BASIC implementation, but, nonetheless, several orders of magnitude slower when running on the school-provided MITRA-15M (a fortunately obliterated French 16-bits minicomputer developed by Compagnie Industrielle pour l'Informatique and Société Européenne de Mini-Informatique et de Systèmes). On the lighter side, during a short stay in Normandy, his first engagement with the computer game Zork (West of House!) on an Apple II is another enlightenment. At about the same time, Alain Rappaport and fellow medical student David Servan-Schreiber offered Mr Chauvet the unique opportunity to share, for a few exciting months, the night-time revelling life of "Camembert du Haut" dwellers at the Centre Mondial Informatique et Ressource Humaine. During these nocturnal mind-bending sessions, he is fortunate enough to work on one of the only 2 LMI LISP machines available in France at the time, next to a similarly younger Brewster Kahle, busy working on the other one. Mr Chauvet starts maniacally editing ZetaLisp code in Zmacs.
He was a Visiting Scientist at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, under the direction of Pr. Raj Reddy and Pr. Michael Rychener (1982,1983).
In the subterranean depths of Wean Hall, Dr Alain Rappaport and
Jean-Marie Chauvet are now usually found busy typing out a Technical
Report on the progress of their seminal research in Artificial
Intelligence. Immersed in Emacs, running this time on a DEC-20 of
mammoth proportions, they become adept at weaving intricate Scribe
markup in their text, preparing it for further processing by the
text-formatting program Bolio. Mr Chauvet edits some LISP code in
Emacs, too.
Between short naps, he also gapes at a Xerox Alto, with a bewildering array of so-called "icons", "windows", and "menus", driven by this clunky brick called a "mouse". The machine is sitting a bit apart from the others in the computer room, its uncommon vertical screen glowing a characteristic blue light on a neatly aligned row of neighbouring Three Rivers' Perq workstations. Mr Chauvet timidly fumbles at the Draw program to layout some figures for The Technical Report, but, truth to be said, stays up all night, mesmerized by Mazewar, a multi-player game played over a network-a network!-of Altos. With Dr Rappaport, he travels to Boston and meets Pete Szolovits and Ramesh Patil. While Richard Stallman demonstrates folk dances in a basement, Messrs Chauvet and Rappaport explore Vassar Street, experiment with Symbolics LISP machines, and pay off-hours secret visits to Atari research laboratories. Back in Pittsburgh, though, Mr Chauvet displays a persistent preference for the incomparable Big'Os hoagies over Skibo's daily diet. Mentored by Mike Rychener, Raj Reddy and Allen Newell, he furiously edits some OPS5 code in Emacs.
He then joined Amdahl Commmunications Systems Division., Marina del Rey, CA, USA, as a Software Engineer (data networks software and protocols, X25, Asynchronous Transfer Mode switches), at the Future Products and Planning division, reporting to Dr. Joe Rinde and Pr. Mario Gerla (1984).
While the City of Angels bathes in pastel colors and Olympic Games
excitement, Mr Chauvet discovers Unix Time-Sharing and the Simple
Portable Simulation Language in the recesses of the ventilated
computer room at the former Tran Telecommunications Corp., only
recently acquired by Amdahl Corp. A bit disoriented, he edits some C
code in vi.
Under the guidance of Joe Rinde, head of the Future Product and Planning division, Prof. Mario Gerla from UCLA, and Alexander Brandwajn, of the San Jose offices, Mr Chauvet is assigned the task of developing computer simulations of a new network protocol, to be much later known as Asynchronous Transfer Mode. Mr Brandwajn, a former student of Prof. Erol Gelenbe whom Mr Chauvet had met at the Centre Mondial in Paris, is nonplussed by Mr Chauvet's work. Which is not to be considered an excuse for sneaking in into the UCLA Computer Science building, where Mr Chauvet finds some relief in long chats over an extraordinary network called Arpanet with Dr Rappaport, himself then at work on CMU-CS-C in Pittsburgh.
In 1985, with Patrick Perez and Alain Rappaport, he co-founded Neuron Data, Palo Alto, CA, USA, and served as Chief Technology Officer. Mr Chauvet co-designed and co-authored NEXPERT, the leading Macintosh, PC and workstation-based Artificial Intelligence and expert system tool.
On a Lisa 2/5, the purchase of which expediously sank all of his
student's savings, in spite of Alain Rappaport and Patrick Perez more
than generous participation in its procurement, Mr Chauvet contributes
the original Pascal code for the NEXPERT groundbreaking Macintosh
application. In order to do so, he edits some code with the Lisa
Workshop Environment, then separately creates Macintosh 400K-formatted
disks with the MACCOM utility.
Messrs Perez, Rappaport and Chauvet, through some incredible circumstances now permanent guests at the Apple Bandley 3 building in Cupertino, simply spend most of their time in the recesses of the lobby, a short hop from the free Odwalla juice ("Juices for Humans") dispensing machine, sleeping, pondering over two "Inside Macintosh" massive binders, and editing more Pascal code. On sunny Palo Alto Saturday mornings, Mr Chauvet often bumps into Alain Rossmann or Andy Hertzfeld at the (now defunct) Stacey's bookshop on University Ave. Earlier on, he had demonstrated NEXPERT to a sneering Steve Jobs, who almost threw tehem out of the premises. With Messrs Rappaport and Perez, he finds some solace with Joanna Hoffman and (a notwithstanding unconvinced by NEXPERT) Larry Tesler. The trio flies out to Los Angeles, self-convinced that demoing to Alan Kay, at his home on Octagon Street would elicit strong support for NEXPERT at Apple. During a soul-searching, animated full night debate at the Tropicana Motel, they decide to attend IJCAI-85 as commercial exhibitors, publicly demonstrating NEXPERT for the first time. In utter haste, fervid improvisation miraculously supplying for a complete lack of preparation, they come up with a kind of booth which mainly consists of a stack of gigantic TV monitors, heavily encased in steel, towering a Macintosh sitting next to it on a low table. The uncommon design surprisingly meets with instant success at the show. At IJCAI-85, they also crash on the sofa in Joanna Hoffman's room at the Bel Air Hotel, planning to stay up all night, rehearsing for an interview with Esther Dyson the next day. As it happens, Mrs Dyson is indeed intrigued by an oversized paper printouts, The Rules Network, they keep carrying around as if to materialize the knowledge worker's new source of power in the undoubtly opening NEXPERT era.
He managed Product Marketing and Communication on a worldwide basis, developed marketing strategy, and was spokesman for Neuron Data to its customers, channels OEMs, ISVs and distributors. As Executive Director, he represented Neuron Data in standard bodies and organizations (W3C, OMG...).
All during which Mr Chauvet also believes important to edit more
C code in Emacs. Fortunately enough, he can subsequently revel in his
inclination on DOS and on (very) early versions of Windows-including
version 0.95, with which Neuron Data is one of the few selected
software companies invited to demonstrate support of Windows during
the Wall Street roadshow at Microsoft's IPO in 1986, Patrick Perez
standing on stage with a younger Bill Gates.
Mr Chauvet legitimately indulges into more C code editing in Emacs, for OS/2 and Presentation Manager; on VMS-based DEC VAXstations (running pre-Motif UIS graphics); on Apollo workstations (running Aegis); on Sun workstations, running either OpenLook or in full NeWS splendor before they morphed into X-Windows and Motif avatars; as well as stints on AIX-powered IBM RS6000 and HP-UX HP workstations. Emacs ran well on all these fine machines!
Mr Chauvet of course now turns to editing Java code in Emacs. Although
he sometimes switches to Eclipse for exploratory Java programming, the
success of Linux yielded yet another excellent opportunity to dust off
the GNU compiler and its tools, and, neddless to say, Emacs.
Mr Chauvet joined Dassault
Développement at inception in 1997. Beyond investing on a pan-European basis, he specifically initiated
and managed international investments in the USA and in Israel.
Mr Chauvet watches with interest the babelization of XML and other
intriguing phenomena. Precarious explorations with GCL, Clips, XSB,
Twelf and many Open Source projects--so reminiscent of younger days now
past--are still sideline activities in which he indulges away from the
day-to-day routine of investing in high-tech startups. Still on the
look for new ideas in his never really forgotten special interests in
AI, Mr Chauvet fondly devotes some alarmingly long lapses of time to
editing more code in Emacs.
Mr Chauvet is a member of IEEE, ACM, AAAS. Mr Chauvet also teaches at College de l'Ecole polytechnique, at the Universite technique de Compiegne (Institut du management de l'information), and at the Ecole Française d'Electronique et d'Informatique. He is a member of the Steering Committee of the Information and Communication Technologies department of the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, and a Board Member of the Ecole nationale supérieure de Cognitique of Bordeaux University. Books
Articles and Conferences
Related books and papersThese books are edited by Alain Rappaport, co-founder of Neuron Data:
Archives, Scientific Papers, Editorial CommentsArchived papers:
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He also participated in the acquisition of
Microline Inc., a Java startup, in 1996, and founded and bootstrapped Neuron Data Europe-based subsidiaries
in France, UK, and Germany. Neuron Data's successful IPO in 2000, was underwritten by Robertson
Stephens and Hambrecht and Quist., and valued the company at $830m
(
