Background
Yann LeCun was born near Paris, France, in 1960.
software engineer electrical engineer computer scientist
Yann LeCun was born near Paris, France, in 1960.
He received a Diplôme d"Ingénieur from the Ecole Superieure d"Ingénieur en Electrotechnique et Electronique (ESIEE), Paris in 1983, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science from Université Pierre et Marie Curie in 1987 during which he proposed an early form of the back-propagation learning algorithm for neural networks.
He is well known for his work on optical character recognition and computer vision using convolutional neural networks (Cable News Network), and is a founding father of convolutional nets. He is also one of the main creators of the DjVu image compression technology (together with Léon Bottou and Patrick Haffner). He co-developed the Lush programming language with Léon Bottou.
In 1988, he joined the Adaptive Systems Research Department at American Telephone & Telegraph Company Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, United States of America, where he developed a number of new machine learning methods, such as a biologically inspired model of image recognition called Convolutional Neural Networks, the "Optimal Brain Damage" regularization methods, and the Graph Transformer Networks method (similar to conditional random field), which he applied to handwriting recognition and Optical Character Recognition. The bank check recognition system that he helped develop was widely deployed by National Cash Register and other companies, reading over 10% of all the checks in the United States in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
In 1996, he joined American Telephone & Telegraph Company Labs-Research as head of the Image Processing Research Department, which was part of Lawrence Rabiner"s Speech and Image Processing Research Laboratory, and worked primarily on the DjVu image compression technology, used by many websites, notably the Internet Archive, to distribute scanned documents. His collaborators at American Telephone & Telegraph Company include Léon Bottou and Vladimir Vapnik.
After a brief tenure as a Fellow of the Nippon Electric Corporation Research Institute (now Nippon Electric Corporation-Labs America) in Princeton, New Jersey, he joined New York University (New York University) in 2003, where he is Silver Professor of Computer Science Neural Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Science and the Center for Neural Science. He is also a professor at Polytechnic Institute of New York University.
At New York University, he has worked primarily on Energy-Based Models for supervised and unsupervised learning, feature learning for object recognition in Computer Vision, and mobile robotics.
In 2012, he became the founding director of the New York University Center for Data Science. On December 9, 2013, LeCun became the first director of Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research in New York City., and stepped down from the New York University-Credit default swap directorship in early 2014. LeCun is the recipient of the 2014 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Neural Network Pioneer Award.
In 2013, he and Yoshua Bengio co-founded the International Conference on Learning Representations, which adopted a post-publication open review process he previously advocated on his website.
He was the chair and organizer of the "Learning Workshop" held every year between 1986 and 2012 in Snowbird, Utah. He is the Company-Director of the Neural Computation & Adaptive Perception research program of CIFAR
In 2016, he is the "Informatique et Sciences Numériques" professor of computer science at Collège de France in Paris.
His "leçon inaugurale" has been an important event in 2016 Paris intellectual life.
He is a member of the Science Advisory Board of the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at University of California, Los Angeles, and has been on the advisory board of a number of companies, including MuseAmi, KXEN Incorporated., and Vidient Systems.