Michel Parent is currently scientific advisor to IMARA, the INRIA research team on advanced road transport. This team focuses on research and development of information and communication technologies for road transport and in particular on fully automated vehicles (the cybercars). He was the creator and director of this team between 1991 and 2010 and is considered as the “father” of the cybercar concept as he was the coordinator of the European Project CyberCars between 2001 and 2004 and the follow-up project CyberCars2 (2006-2009). He was involved in many other French or European projects on ITS and he is recognized worldwide as an expert in innovative transportation technologies.
Before his positions at IMARA, 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 the robotics industry. He was the president of the French Robotics Association between 1974 and 1979. He is the author of several books on robotics, vision and intelligent vehicles, 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, Cleveland, USA.
