Dr Jean-François Abramatic’s career has been shared between research and industry in the areas of computer science and applied mathematics.
He started his career as a research scientist in differential games (Ecole des Mines de Paris 1972-1974) and image processing (IRIA 1974-1983). After managing a research and development programme (1984-1988) aimed at designing scientific workstations, he became chairman and CEO of a start-up company selling graphics terminals (1988-1991) which merged with a US partner (1992).
In 1993, he returned to Inria as Director of Development and Industrial Relations (1993-1996). Among various development partnerships, he launched the European host of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1995. In 1996, he moved to MIT to become Chairman of W3C (1996-2001).
He then joined ILOG as Vice President of Research and Development and became Chief Product Officer in 2004. After the acquisition of ILOG by IBM in 2008, he became Director of ILOG Research and Development within IBM Software Group. In 2011, he moved to IBM headquarters as Director Development Productivity & Innovation in the Enterprise Transformation division. He retired from IBM in 2014 and returned to Inria in the Transfer & Innovation division as Research Director.
Since January 2017, Jean-François Abramatic is Inria Senior Scientist Emeritus. He is an advisor to the Software Heritage initiative. He has been a member of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Executive Board from 2019 to 2020.
Jean-François Abramatic received his engineering degree from Ecole des Mines de Nancy (1971) and his PhD from University of Paris (1980).
