He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, where he worked with Douglas Hofstadter on the Tabletop computational cognitive model.
[1] French is the inventor of Tabletop, a computer program that forms analogies in a microdomain consisting of everyday objects placed on a table.
French now believes that the way forward in AI does not lie in an attempt to flawlessly simulate human cognition (i.e., pass a Turing Test) but, rather, in trying to design computers capable of developing their own abilities to understand the world and in interacting with these machines in a meaningful manner.
[2] He has published work on catastrophic forgetting in neural networks, the Turing test and foundations of cognitive science, the evolution of sex, and categorization and learning in infants, among other topics.
[3] During his years there, he collaborated with a colleague, Jacqueline Henry, on the French translation of Douglas Hofstadter's bestseller Gödel, Escher, Bach.
He spent several months in 1992 as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition at Indiana University.