Yann LeCun

{{Infobox scientist

| name = Yann LeCun

| image = Laura Chaubard & Yann Le Cun - 2024 (53814052697) (cropped).jpg

| caption = LeCun in 2024

| birth_place = Soisy-sous-Montmorency, France

| birth_date = {{birth date and age|1960|07|08|df=y}}

| fields = Computer science

| workplaces = {{Plainlist|

}}

| citizenship = {{ indented plainlist |

}}

| education = {{ubl |ESIEE Paris (DipIng) |Pierre and Marie Curie University (PhD)}}

| thesis_title = Modeles connexionnistes de l'apprentissage (connectionist learning models)

| thesis_year = 1987

| thesis_url = http://www.sudoc.fr/043586643

| doctoral_advisor = Maurice Milgram

| known_for = Deep learning

| awards = {{Plainlist|

Turing Award (2018)
AAAI Fellow (2019)
Legion of Honour (2023)
VinFuture Prize (2024)
Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (2025)

}}

| website = {{Official URL}}

}}

Yann André Le Cun{{Cite web|url=https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jo_pdf.do?id=JORFTEXT000039726325|title=Version électronique authentifiée publiée au JO n° 0001 du 01/01/2020 {{!}} Legifrance|website=www.legifrance.gouv.fr|lang=fr|access-date=4 January 2020}} ({{IPAc-en|l|ə|ˈ|k|ʌ|n}} {{respell|lə|KUN}}, {{IPA|fr|ləkœ̃|lang}};{{Cite web|url=http://yann.lecun.com/ex/fun/|title=Fun Stuff|website=yann.lecun.com|access-date=20 March 2020}} usually spelled LeCun; born 8 July 1960) is a French-American computer scientist working primarily in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, mobile robotics and computational neuroscience. He is the Silver Professor of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University and Vice President, Chief AI Scientist at Meta.{{cite news |title=Artificial-intelligence pioneers win $1 million Turing Award |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/27/artificial-intelligence-pioneers-win-turing-award/?noredirect=on |newspaper=The Washington Post |language=en}}{{cite web|last1=Metz|first1=Cade|date=27 March 2019|title=Turing Award Won by 3 Pioneers in Artificial Intelligence|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/technology/turing-award-ai.html|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210616050405/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/technology/turing-award-ai.html|archive-date=16 June 2021|website=The New York Times}}

He is well known for his work on optical character recognition and computer vision using convolutional neural networks (CNNs).{{Cite web|url=https://medium.com/kaggle-blog/convolutional-nets-and-cifar-10-an-interview-with-yann-lecun-2ffe8f9ee3d6/|title=Convolutional Nets and CIFAR-10: An Interview with Yann LeCun|date=22 December 2014|website=No Free Hunch}}{{cite journal|last1=LeCun|first1=Yann|last2=Bottou|first2=Léon|author-link2=Léon Bottou|last3=Bengio|first3=Yoshua|author-link3=Yoshua Bengio|last4=Haffner|first4=Patrick|year=1998|title=Gradient-based learning applied to document recognition|url=http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/publis/pdf/lecun-01a.pdf|journal=Proceedings of the IEEE|volume=86|issue=11|pages=2278–2324|doi=10.1109/5.726791|s2cid=14542261 }} 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 2018, LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton, received the Turing Award for their work on deep learning.{{cite web|url=https://www.acm.org/media-center/2019/march/turing-award-2018|title=Fathers of the Deep Learning Revolution Receive ACM A.M. Turing Award|website=Association for Computing Machinery|date=27 March 2019|location=New York|access-date=27 March 2019}} The three are sometimes referred to as the "Godfathers of AI" and "Godfathers of Deep Learning".{{Cite web|url=https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/27/18280665/ai-godfathers-turing-award-2018-yoshua-bengio-geoffrey-hinton-yann-lecun|title='Godfathers of AI' honored with Turing Award, the Nobel Prize of computing|first=James|last=Vincent|date=27 March 2019|website=The Verge|access-date=20 March 2020}}{{Cite web|url=https://www.techtimes.com/articles/240511/20190329/godfathers-of-ai-win-this-years-turing-award-and-1-million.htm|title=Godfathers Of AI Win This Year's Turing Award And $1 Million|first=Ted|last=Ranosa|date=29 March 2019|website=Tech Times|access-date=20 March 2020}}{{Cite news|url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2019/03/27/google-awards-1m-turing-prize-godfathers-ai/|title=Nobel prize of tech awarded to 'godfathers of AI'|first=Telegraph|last=Reporters|newspaper=The Telegraph|date=27 March 2019|access-date=20 March 2020}}{{Cite web|url=https://www.forbes.com/sites/samshead/2019/03/27/the-3-godfathers-of-ai-have-won-the-prestigious-1m-turing-prize/|title=The 3 'Godfathers' Of AI Have Won The Prestigious $1M Turing Prize|first=Sam|last=Shead|website=Forbes|access-date=20 March 2020}}{{Cite web|url=https://www.zdnet.com/article/deep-learning-godfathers-bengio-hinton-and-lecun-say-the-field-can-fix-its-flaws/|title=Deep learning godfathers Bengio, Hinton, and LeCun say the field can fix its flaws|first=Tiernan|last=Ray|publisher=ZDNet|access-date=20 March 2020}}{{cite web |url=https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-27/three-godfathers-of-deep-learning-selected-for-turing-award |website=bloomberg.com |first1=Jeremy |last1=Kahn |title=Three 'Godfathers of Deep Learning' Selected for Turing Award |access-date=10 November 2020 |date=27 March 2019 |url-access=subscription}}

Early life and education

File:Yann LeCun at the University of Minnesota.jpg, 2014]]

LeCun was born on 8 July 1960, at Soisy-sous-Montmorency in the suburbs of Paris. His name, Le Cun, originates from the old Breton form Le Cunff, and was from the region of Guingamp in northern Brittany. "Yann" is the Breton form for "John".

He received a Diplôme d'Ingénieur from the ESIEE Paris in 1983 and a Ph.D. in computer science from Université Pierre et Marie Curie (today Sorbonne University) in 1987 during which he proposed an early form of the back-propagation learning algorithm for neural networks.Y. LeCun: Une procédure d'apprentissage pour réseau a seuil asymmetrique (a Learning Scheme for Asymmetric Threshold Networks), Proceedings of Cognitiva 85, 599–604, Paris, France, 1985. Before joining AT&T,{{cite web | url=https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/technology/turing-award-ai.html | title=Turing Award Won by 3 Pioneers in Artificial Intelligence (Published 2019) | website=The New York Times | date=27 March 2019 }} LeCun was a postdoc for a year, starting in 1987, under Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto.

Career

= Bell Labs =

In 1988, LeCun joined the Adaptive Systems Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, United States, headed by Lawrence D. Jackel, where he developed a number of new machine learning methods, such as a biologically inspired model of image recognition called convolutional neural networks (LeNet),Y. LeCun, B. Boser, J. S. Denker, D. Henderson, R. E. Howard, W. Hubbard and L. D. Jackel: [https://web.archive.org/web/20100612150820/http://www.ics.uci.edu/~welling/teaching/273ASpring09/lecun-89e.pdf Backpropagation Applied to Handwritten Zip Code Recognition], Neural Computation, 1(4):541–551, Winter 1989. the "Optimal Brain Damage" regularization methods,Yann LeCun, J. S. Denker, S. Solla, R. E. Howard and L. D. Jackel: [https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/1989/file/6c9882bbac1c7093bd25041881277658-Paper.pdf Optimal Brain Damage], in Touretzky, David (Eds), Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 2 (NIPS*89), Morgan Kaufmann, Denver, CO, 1990. and the Graph Transformer Networks method (similar to conditional random field), which he applied to handwriting recognition and Optical character recognition (OCR).Yann LeCun, Léon Bottou, Yoshua Bengio and Patrick Haffner: [http://www.dengfanxin.cn/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/1998Lecun.pdf Gradient Based Learning Applied to Document Recognition], Proceedings of IEEE, 86(11):2278–2324, 1998. The bank check recognition system that he helped develop was widely deployed by NCR and other companies, reading over 10% of all the checks in the US in the late 1990s and early 2000s.{{citation needed|date=March 2019}}

In 1996, he joined AT&T Labs-Research as head of the Image Processing Research Department, which was part of Lawrence Rabiner's Speech and Image Processing Research Lab, and worked primarily on the DjVu image compression technology,Léon Bottou, Patrick Haffner, Paul G. Howard, Patrice Simard, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun: High Quality Document Image Compression with DjVu, Journal of Electronic Imaging, 7(3):410–425, 1998. used by many websites, notably the Internet Archive, to distribute scanned documents.{{citation needed|date=March 2019}} His collaborators at AT&T include Léon Bottou and Vladimir Vapnik.

= New York University =

After a brief tenure as a Fellow of the NEC Research Institute (now NEC-Labs America) in Princeton, NJ, LeCun joined New York University (NYU) in 2003, where he is Jacob T. Schwartz Chaired Professor of Computer Science and Neural Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and the Center for Neural Science. He is also a professor at the Tandon School of Engineering.{{cite web|url=http://www.poly.edu/academics/departments/electrical/people|title=People – Electrical and Computer Engineering|publisher=Polytechnic Institute of New York University|access-date=13 March 2013}}{{Cite web | url=http://yann.lecun.com/ | title=Yann LeCun's Home Page}} At NYU, he has worked primarily on Energy-Based Models for supervised and unsupervised learning,Yann LeCun, Sumit Chopra, Raia Hadsell, Ranzato Marc'Aurelio and Fu-Jie Huang: A Tutorial on Energy-Based Learning, in Bakir, G. and Hofman, T. and Schölkopf, B. and Smola, A. and Taskar, B. (Eds), Predicting Structured Data, MIT Press, 2006. feature learning for object recognition in Computer Vision,Kevin Jarrett, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Marc'Aurelio Ranzato and Yann LeCun: What is the Best Multi-Stage Architecture for Object Recognition?, Proc. International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV'09), IEEE, 2009 and mobile robotics.Raia Hadsell, Pierre Sermanet, Marco Scoffier, Ayse Erkan, Koray Kavackuoglu, Urs Muller and Yann LeCun: Learning Long-Range Vision for Autonomous Off-Road Driving, Journal of Field Robotics, 26(2):120–144, February 2009.

In 2012, he became the founding director of the NYU Center for Data Science.{{Cite web | url=http://cds.nyu.edu | title=Center for Data Science – New York University}} On 9 December 2013, LeCun became the first director of Meta AI Research in New York City,{{Cite web |url=https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10151728212367143 |title=Yann LeCun |via=Facebook}}{{Primary source inline|date=January 2023}}{{cite web |url=https://research.fb.com/people/lecun-yann/ |title=DIRECTOR OF AI RESEARCH |via=Facebook |date=2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170427100717/https://research.fb.com/people/lecun-yann/ |archive-date=27 April 2017 |url-status=live}} and stepped down from the NYU-CDS directorship in early 2014.

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 organiser of the "Learning Workshop" held every year between 1986 and 2012 in Snowbird, Utah. He is a member of the Science Advisory Board of the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematicshttp://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/gss2012/ Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA. He is the Co-Director of the Learning in Machines and Brain research program (formerly Neural Computation & Adaptive Perception) of CIFAR.{{cite web|url=http://www.cifar.ca/yann-lecun |title=Neural Computation & Adaptive Perception Advisory Committee Yann LeCun |publisher=CIFAR|access-date=16 December 2013}}

In 2016, he was the visiting professor of computer science on the "Chaire Annuelle Informatique et Sciences Numériques" at Collège de France in Paris, where he presented the "leçon inaugurale" (inaugural lecture).{{Cite web|url=https://www.college-de-france.fr/site/yann-lecun/inaugural-lecture-2016-02-04-18h00.htm|title=L'apprentissage profond : une révolution en intelligence artificielle|website=college-de-france.fr|date=28 August 2015 |accessdate=1 March 2022}} In 2023, he was named as the inaugural Jacob T. Schwartz Chaired Professor in Computer Science at NYU's Courant Institute.{{cite web|url=https://cims.nyu.edu/dynamic/news/1441/ |title=Yann LeCun Announced as Inaugural Jacob T. Schwartz Chair |publisher=CIMS|access-date=10 December 2023}} LeCun is also a scientific advisor to French research group Kyutai which is being funded by Xavier Niel, Rodolphe Saadé, Eric Schmidt, and others.{{Cite web |last=Dillet |first=Romain |date=2023-11-17 |title=Kyutai is a French AI research lab with a $330 million budget that will make everything open source |url=https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/17/kyutai-is-an-french-ai-research-lab-with-a-330-million-budget-that-will-make-everything-open-source/ |access-date=2024-06-16 |website=TechCrunch |language=en-US}}

Honours and awards

LeCun is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences,{{Cite web|url=http://www.nasonline.org/news-and-multimedia/news/2021-nas-election.html|title=News from the National Academy of Sciences|date=26 April 2021|access-date=4 July 2021|quote=Newly elected members and their affiliations at the time of election are: … LeCun, Yann; vice president and chief artificial intelligence scientist, Facebook; and Silver Professor of Computer Science, Data Science, Neural Science, and Electrical and Computer Engineering, New York University, New York City}}, entry in member directory:{{Cite web|url=http://www.nasonline.org/member-directory/members/20022803.html|title=Member Directory|access-date=4 July 2021|publisher=National Academy of Sciences}} National Academy of Engineering and the French Académie des Sciences.

He has received honorary doctorates from IPN in Mexico City{{cite web|title=Primera generación de Doctorados Honoris Causa en el IPN|url=http://www.ipn.mx/CCS/2016/Paginas/468.aspx|access-date=11 October 2016}} in 2016, from EPFL{{cite web|title=EPFL celebrates 1,043 new Master's graduates|date=10 August 2018|url=https://actu.epfl.ch/news/epfl-celebrates-1043-new-master-s-graduates/|access-date=27 January 2019|last1=Aubort|first1=Sarah}}{{cite web|title=Yann LeCun @EPFL – "Self-supervised learning: could machines learn like humans?"| date=5 October 2018 |via = YouTube|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7I0Qt7GALVk |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/youtube/20211221/7I0Qt7GALVk |archive-date=21 December 2021 |url-status=live|access-date=27 January 2019}}{{cbignore}} in 2018, from Université Côte d'Azur in 2021,{{Cite web|url=https://newsroom.univ-cotedazur.fr/yann-lecun-docteur-honoris-causa-duniversite-cote-dazur|title=YANN LECUN, DOCTEUR HONORIS CAUSA D'UNIVERSITÉ CÔTE D'AZUR|work=Newsroom |last1=Sanfilippo |first1=Delphine }} from Università di Siena in 2023,{{Cite web|url=https://www.unisi.it/unisilife/eventi/laurea-ad-honorem-yann-lecun|title=Laurea ad honorem a Yann LeCun | Università degli Studi di Siena|website=www.unisi.it}} and from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2023.

In 2014, he received the IEEE Neural Network Pioneer Award and in 2015, the PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award.{{cite web | title=PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award | website=IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence | date=2023-08-24 | url=https://tc.computer.org/tcpami/awards/pami-distinguished-researcher-award/ | access-date=2024-02-15}}

In 2018, LeCun was awarded the IRI Medal, established by the Industrial Research Institute (IRI),{{Cite web|url=https://iriweb.org/about/awards/|title=Awards - Best Practices in Digital Innovation|website=Innovation Research Interchange}} and the Harold Pender Award, given by the University of Pennsylvania.{{cite web|title=2018 Harold Pender Award and Lecture: Yann LeCun|url=https://events.seas.upenn.edu/distinguished-lectures/pender-lecture/|access-date=22 May 2019}}

In 2019, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.{{cite web |title=Golden Plate Awardees of the American Academy of Achievement |url=https://achievement.org/our-history/golden-plate-awards/#science-exploration |website=achievement.org |publisher=American Academy of Achievement}}

In March 2019, LeCun won the 2018 Turing Award, sharing it with Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton.{{Cite news |last=Metz |first=Cade |date=27 March 2019 |title=Three Pioneers in Artificial Intelligence Win Turing Award |language=en-US |work=The New York Times |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/technology/turing-award-hinton-lecun-bengio.html |access-date=27 March 2019 |issn=0362-4331}}

In 2022, he received the Princess of Asturias Award in the category "Scientific Research", along with Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis.{{Cite web|url=https://www.fpa.es/en/princess-of-asturias-awards/laureates/2022-geoffrey-hinton-yann-lecun-yoshua-bengio-and-demis-hassabis.html?especifica=0&idCategoria=0&anio=2022&especifica=0|title=Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio and Demis Hassabis - Laureates - Princess of Asturias Awards|first=Developed with webControl CMS by Intermark|last=IT|website=The Princess of Asturias Foundation}}

In 2023, the President of France made him a Chevalier (Knight) of the French Legion of Honour.{{Cite web|url=https://www.linkedin.com/posts/yann-lecun_today-i-was-made-a-chevalier-de-la-l%C3%A9gion-activity-7138326352776056832-GQFp|title=Yann LeCun on LinkedIn: Today, I was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur by President Macron… | 590 comments|website=www.linkedin.com}}

During the World Economic Forum (WEF) 2024 in Davos, he received the Global Swiss AI Award 2023.[https://www.zhaw.ch/en/about-us/news/news-releases/news-detail/event-news/yann-lecun-wins-the-global-swiss-ai-award-2023/ Yann LeCun wins the Global Swiss AI Award 2023.] zhaw.ch, 18 January 2024. Retrieved 22 January 2024. In the same year, he received the grand prize of the VinFuture Prize alongside Yoshua Bengio, Jensen Huang, Geoffrey Hinton, and Fei-Fei Li for their groundbreaking contributions to neural networks and deep learning algorithms.{{Cite web |date=December 7, 2024 |title=The VinFuture 2024 Grand Prize honours 5 scientists for transformational contributions to the advancement of deep learning |url=https://vietnamnews.vn/Society/1688552/the-vinfuture-2024-grand-prize-honours-5-scientists-for-transformational-contributions-to-the-advancement-of-deep-learning.html |website=Việt Nam News}}