Vice President and Chief AI Scientist, Facebook
New York University Silver Professor, Courant Institute of Math, Sciences & Center for Data Science
Yann LeCun, Ph.D., is vice president and chief AI scientist at Facebook and Silver Professor at NYU affiliated with the Courant Institute and the Center for Data Science. He was the founding director of Facebook AI Research and of the NYU Center for Data Science.
Dr. LeCun received a degree in electrical engineering from ESIEE (Paris) in 1983 and a doctorate in computer science from Sorbonne Université (Paris) in 1987. After a postdoc at the University of Toronto, he joined AT&T Bell Laboratories. He became head of the Image Processing Research Department at AT&T Labs-Research in 1996 and joined NYU in 2003 after a short tenure at the NEC Research Institute. In late 2013, Dr. LeCun became director of AI Research at Facebook while remaining on the NYU Faculty part-time. He was a visiting professor at Collège de France in 2016.
Dr. LeCun's 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. 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 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".