A 2001 UTC engi­neer­ing grad­u­ate, major­ing in com­put­er sci­ences, Ste­ny Soli­tude is a spe­cial­ist in sig­nal pro­cess­ing and cul­tur­al indus­tries. He found­ed the start-up com­pa­ny Per­fect Mem­o­ry, ded­i­cat­ed to knowl­edge engi­neer­ing. Here is a por­trait of a man who has always worked to break down barriers.

It was while attend­ing sec­ondary school in Les Minguettes, a work­ing-class neigh­bour­hood near Lyon, that Ste­ny Soli­tude decid­ed on his career path: to become a research sci­en­tist in order, as he says, to push back the bound­aries of inno­va­tion. After two years at uni­ver­si­ty and a few years work­ing to finance his stud­ies, he was admit­ted to UTC through a con­tin­u­ing edu­ca­tion pro­gramme with a spe­cif­ic goal in mind: to analyse the issue of knowl­edge trans­fer. This came at just the right time, as the uni­ver­si­ty had just cre­at­ed a cul­tur­al indus­tries engi­neer­ing pro­gramme under the lead­er­ship of Bernard Stiegler. “It’s a pro­gramme that trains engi­neers who are some­what atyp­i­cal, skilled as they are in soft­ware engi­neer­ing but who also under­stand what a cul­tur­al object is and how it can become an indus­tri­al object,” he says.

The meet­ing with Bernard Stiegler was deci­sive for the young Ste­ny Soli­tude, as he offered him a job on the ‘Dig­i­tal Ter­ri­to­ries’ project as soon as he arrived at UTC. “How­ev­er, I wait­ed until I was award­ed my degree before join­ing him. It was a project that was already rais­ing the issue of indus­tri­al con­tent pro­duc­tion. Bernard sug­gest­ed that I work on audio­vi­su­al writ­ing, since that’s what cir­cu­lates the most. Con­se­quent­ly, we devel­oped a con­nect­ed seman­tic cam­era equipped with a device that guides the per­son film­ing. The result is what we call ‘util­i­ty video’ or ‘util­i­ty cul­tur­al object’. These are objects that can be used in tourist guides with videos of accom­mo­da­tion venues staged by their own­ers, for exam­ple,” he explains.

After a short peri­od at Ske­ma, a start-up spe­cial­is­ing in con­nect­ed cam­eras, as direc­tor of tech­nol­o­gy, he decid­ed to set up a col­lab­o­ra­tive project in 2008: the Per­fect Lab, ded­i­cat­ed to research. “The idea I enter­tained was to devel­op a space for shar­ing and stor­ing con­tent, there­by enabling dif­fer­ent pro­fes­sions and dif­fer­ent users with­in the same ecosys­tem to access these high added­val­ue dig­i­tal resources. Mak­ing con­tent acces­si­ble and under­stand­able is a major chal­lenge, espe­cial­ly as the entire econ­o­my is shift­ing to IP net­works and the num­ber of data­bas­es has explod­ed,” says Ste­ny Solitude.

With the proof of con­cept estab­lished in Per­fect Lab, he launched Per­fect Mem­o­ry in 2019, which recent­ly appoint­ed a sci­en­tif­ic com­mit­tee chaired by Bruno Bachi­mont, a lec­tur­er-cum-research sci­en­tist at UTC. The com­pa­ny has devel­oped the Knowl­edge Oper­at­ing Sys­tem (KOS), a tool for organ­is­ing and col­lect­ing the knowl­edge and exper­tise of a giv­en organ­i­sa­tion and trans­form­ing it to ensure direct access while pro­vid­ing con­tex­tu­alised for­mat­ting accord­ing to each user’s needs. “To achieve this, we have mobilised var­i­ous advanced tech­nolo­gies such as for­mal AI, sta­tis­ti­cal AI, data engi­neer­ing and knowl­edge engi­neer­ing. Today, KOS is deployed at Nascar, among oth­ers, to store the bil­lions of data col­lect­ed dur­ing car races and make them acces­si­ble in an intel­li­gi­ble way to users, fans and spon­sors, for exam­ple, but also to the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion for the data pro­duced with­in it,” he explains.

His expe­ri­ence at UTC? “What I liked was the great intel­lec­tu­al free­dom and the lev­el of ambi­tion that could be assigned to a per­son­al project. At this uni­ver­si­ty, you can – and are encour­aged to do so – “think out­side the box”. After all, aren’t bound­aries meant to be crossed?’ he concludes.

BIO EXPRESS

• 2001: grad­u­at­ed from UTC
• 2008: found­ed Per­fect Lab to lay the tech­no­log­i­cal foun­da­tions for an indus­tri­al knowl­edge engi­neer­ing platform
• 2019: found­ed Per­fect Memory

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