Frederic Kaplan graduated as an engineer of the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications in Paris and received a PhD degreee in Artificial Intelligence from the University Paris VI. He worked ten years as a researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris and supervises now a new team on interactive furniture at CRAFT laboratory of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL). His most recent research focuses on the design of new kinds of computers and robotic objects.

In his research, Frederic Kaplan has been exploring technologies permitting to endow objects with a personal history so that they become different as we interact with them and to learn from one another, thus creating an ecosystem in perpetual evolution. With his colleague Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, he developed a new family of theoretical architectures based on the notion of intrinsic motivation systems, that has been used successfully to create curiosity-driven machines. In parallel with his investigations in artificial intelligence, he collaborates regularly with developmental psychologists, ethologists, neuroscientists, designers and architects. His researches have been published in international scientific journals of these different fields. He authored two popular science books in French "La naissance d'une langue chez les robots" (the birth of a language among robots) (Hermes, 2001) and "Les machines apprivoisées: comprendre les robots de loisir" (Tamed machines: understanding entertainment robots) (Vuibert, 2005) and co-authored a collection of prospective essays "Futur 2.0" (Fyp 2007). He is also the chief editor of the multidisciplinary journal "Frontiers in Neurorobotics" publishing leading edge research in the science and technology of embodied autonomous neural systems. His robots and devices have been exhibited in several museums including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.