Leon Bottou

New York City, United States

Léon received the Diplôme d’Ingénieur de l’École Polytechnique (X84), the Magistère de Mathématiques Fondamentales et Appliquées et d’Informatique from École Normale Supérieure, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Université de Paris-Sud. His research career has taken him to AT&T Bell Laboratories, AT&T Labs Research, NEC Labs America, and Microsoft. Léon then joined Facebook AI Research. The long-term goal of Léon's research is to understand and replicate human-level intelligence. Because this goal requires conceptual advances that cannot be anticipated, Léon’s research has followed many practical and theoretical turns including neural networks applications, stochastic gradient learning algorithms, statistical properties of learning systems, computer vision applications with structured outputs, and theory of large-scale learning. Léon's research aims to clarify the relation between learning and reasoning, with focus on the many aspects of causation (inference, invariance, reasoning, affordance, and intuition).