Yann LeCun

CHIEF AI SCIENTIST | NEW YORK CITY, UNITED STATES

Yann is Chief AI Scientist for Facebook AI Research (FAIR), joining Facebook in December 2013. He is also a Silver Professor at New York University on a part time basis, mainly affiliated with the NYU Center for Data Science, and the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

He received the EE Diploma from Ecole Supérieure d’Ingénieurs en Electrotechnique et Electronique (ESIEE Paris), and a PhD in CS from Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris) in 1987. After a postdoc at the University of Toronto, he joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, NJ in 1988. He became head of the Image Processing Research Department at AT&T Labs-Research in 1996, and joined NYU as a professor in 2003, after a brief period as a Fellow of the NEC Research Institute in Princeton. From 2012 to 2014 he was the founding director of the NYU Center for Data Science. Yann is the co-director of the CIFAR program on Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception Program with Yoshua Bengio.

He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, a fellow of AAAI, the recipient of the 2014 IEEE Neural Network Pioneer Award, the 2015 IEEE Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence Distinguished Researcher Award, the 2016 Lovie Award for Lifetime Achievement, the University of Pennsylvania Pender Award, and received honorary doctorates from IPN, Mexico and EPFL.

He is the recipient of the 2018 ACM Turing Award (with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio) for "conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing."

His research interests include machine learning and artificial intelligence, with applications to computer vision, natural language understanding, robotics, and computational neuroscience. He is best known for his work in deep learning and the invention of the convolutional network method which is widely used for image, video and speech recognition.