Alice Recoque

In 1956 Alice Recoque and Françoise Becquet started designing the mini-computer CAB 500 - the first conversational desktop computer,[5] under the direction of André Richard and François-Henri Raymond.Alice Recoque is appointed head of research and development for the CII's "Small Computers and Associated Systems" division and leads the Mitra 15 project through to its industrialisation.She extended the concept, hitherto confined to aspects of computer programming, to all methods and techniques aimed at studying human behaviour in order to understand and reproduce it.During this mission, carried out in close collaboration with public research bodies such as the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (Inria), Alice Recoque, leading the strategy that mobilised more than 200 people, defined the range of products to be developed by Bull in order to propose a coherent offer in the field of artificial intelligence.These include the development of a grammar in Prolog II intended to understand writings formulated in natural language (in French), the design of the Knowledge representation Object-Oriented Language (KOOL), developed in Lisp for Bull SPS-7 machines (derived from the CNET's SM-90) and intended for the representation of knowledge, and various expert systems.Appreciated for its performance, robustness and reliability, the Mitra 15 has been designed from the outset to be adaptable to a wide range of applications, thanks to an innovative firmware system.Aimed at industrial process control or scientific computing, it was quickly adapted to data transmission, whether in proprietary CII and Unidata systems or as a node in the CYCLADES Network and in secondary education (the so-called "58 high schools" experiment).