User:Cramstein/sandbox

Christophe Ramstein (born January 3, 1966) is a French computer scientist, designer of multimodal user interfaces with haptics and entrepreneur. He is known for being a pioneer in the haptic human–computer interaction field.

Background and contributions
Christophe Ramstein received his Master degree in Computer Science from Joseph Fourier University, France in 1987 and his Doctorate degree in Computer Science from the Grenoble Institute of Technology, France in 1991. His dissertation, supervised by Dr Claude Cadoz was on the Analysis, Representation and Processing of the Instrumental Gesture Applied to Musical Creation.

From 1992 to 1996 he worked at the Canadian research center CCRIT in Laval, Quebec, Canada, partnered with Prof. Vincent Hayward at the Robotic department McGill University and Humanware] to develop the Pantograph a five-bar linkage haptic mouse and the software plug-in to provide visually impaired users with a full-multimodal access to graphical user interfaces. The same haptic device was also used in a space program with Julie Payette to test performance and satisfaction of end-users in micro-gravity.

In Sept 1996 he co-founded Haptic Technologies Inc with Matthew Mather best-selling author of cyberbooks, a company aimed at developing haptic devices and software tools for automotive, consumer desktop and medical applications. The company was acquired by the world leader in haptics Immersion Corp] in March 2000. From 2000 to 2011, Ramstein worked at Immersion, as Director of Software Products, then VP, Engineering, then SVP, Engineering & R&D and eventually CTO. He started by developing software for the very first tactile mice produced by Logitech, developed the concept of Immersive messaging, as well as multiple generations of innovative haptic actuators and software tools including HD LRA, PR-1000, A100, TS-1000, TS3000 and TS-5000 all now in production and shipping in hundreds of millions of devices. His team organically grew Immersion's patent portfolio from a few hundreds in early 2000 to a strong IP portfolio of 1,200 patents - issued and pending - later 2011.

In 2012 in joined Strategic Polymer Science as President and CEO, a company developing a new generation of electro-active polymers (EAP), did the rebranding of the company to Novasentis, completed the ISO-9001 certification, raised over $10M in series B, created strategic partnerships, got the company to win the "Best of innovation award at CES in 2014", brought the novel EAP technology to pre-production, and introduced the breakthrough concepts of ultra-thin haptic keyboards (less than < 1mm), morphing catheters, ultra-thin haptic interfaces for automotive applications, and wearable devices with localized haptics.

Christophe Ramstein scientific contributions include applying haptics to Visually Impaired people, Astronautes, Gaming, Mobile devices, medical simulation and virtual Reality. He pioneered haptic interfaces in the late 1990s, while working at the CCRIT in Montreal Canada.

Patents
Ramstein has co-authored over 50 patents in the field of sensory and haptic user interfaces - issued or pending Patents