Focus on Intuitive Machine

Interview with Vincent Zgueb, founder and manager of Intuitive Machine, the creator of ADIC, the “intelligent and communicative domestic assistant” for personal and family use

Why did you set out to start your own company?

Vincent Zgueb: This was not a first for me. In 2001 founded my first company specializing in consulting on how to develop and integrate IT systems for healthcare, a service aimed at hospitals, clinics and groups of practitioners. After four years in business, the feeling that long-term prospects were lacking together with birth of a child led me to head up the department for applied research and technology transfers at LORIA, that INRIA is of course a part of. But once again the adventure of founding a company was a tempting to me… So I started working in-house with an informal and multidisciplinary group made up of engineers and researchers. Like me, they were very interested in creativity, innovation and an economic adventure. We worked in our spare time, getting together every two weeks to brainstorm innovative ideas and concepts for products that could lead to founding a company. It is during these discussions that the idea for the Intuitive Machine project took shape. At the end of the session running through the first half of 2006, we wound up as five or six to pursue this project up until the creation of a start-up.

How does your domestic assistant meet a current need?

Vincent Zgueb: Technological advances, particularly in IT and communications, are indeed offering us more and more interesting possibilities every day (web, GPS with real-time traffic information, 3G, etc.), but each and every one of us can also now suffer frustrating experiences due to difficulties using certain services. This derives not only from the complexity of the systems themselves, but also from people not allowing for realistic “usage” when designing the products.
At Intuitive Machine, we believe that 90% of the intelligence in systems resides in their human-machine Interactive. This is particularly obvious in the case of the Apple iPhone…and we certainly know what a successful start that had.
We have also confirmed this observation in a study using sample groups (the focus group method), which showed that people are genuinely eager for intelligent systems with natural and intuitive interfaces. That’s what Intuitive Machine is working on currently.
Clearly, developing this type of system is non-trivial. It has to be thought through again from the beginning, because it’s not about dressing up a classical system in some vague way to let it "talk." No. We have to go back to square one: a number of paradigms such as the Folder/File are disappearing. The data is after all derived from “knowledge” that can be accessed in various ways, just like our memories in fact. If we take a digital photo, then it can be a photo, a birthday photo, a personal memory and an event all at the same time. Not very important. The key thing is to be able to retrieve it in just a few seconds. And that’s what our technology, ADIC, lets you do.
Finally, one thing that undoubtedly shows our originality is that we are trying to stay focused on the human aspect when specifying our systems and developing our techniques: how would a person behave in some situation or another?
Our system seems simple in the end, I talk to it and it talks back to me: what would be more natural!

What distribution mode could be used?

Vincent Zgueb: We are thinking mainly in terms of three kinds of targets. First of all, Telecoms and ISPs via their access boxes. In this configuration, the TV could be used as the interface. Secondly, major power utilities that we know are seeking to get close to users through home automation. They could come to offer this personal assistant in exchange for services provided. In this approach, the system would represent a bridgehead in the home. Taking the case of French utility EDF, the power supplier becomes able to adjust demand and better control the consumption of electricity (and therefore its production). They could for example delay starting the heating or the availability of certain devices throughout an entire area, thereby avoiding the need to activate an additional power plant. The third sector worth prospecting its that of major retailers: the conventional superstore and supermarket chains as well as specialist electronics and multimedia product retailers. The idea here is to allow traders to build up a more “intelligent” relationship with their clients. Our solution is a genuine aid to “good” consuming, allowing a proper real-time dialog between suppliers and consumers: product availability, proper planning, advice, ordering remotely, detailed information about the products (integrated bar-code reader), etc.
And finally, we are also thinking about the transport sector, urban transport in particular. Our system could for example help car-pooling by setting up a relationship very easily between the supply and demand for journeys, and doing so in real time from a mobile terminal such as a cellular phone. So there it is: it’s up to our customers to tell us what they are interested in; our solution is highly flexible.