Yann André LeCun (Chinese name Yang Likun) (born July 8, 1960 – ) is a French computer scientist mainly working in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, mobile robotics, and computational neuroscience. He is the Silver Professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, and also Vice President and Chief AI Scientist at Meta (Facebook).
He is known for his work on using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for optical character recognition and computer vision, and is the founder of convolutional networks. He is also one of the main creators of the DjVu image compression technology (together with Léon Bottou and Patrick Haffner). Together with Léon Bottou, he developed the Lush programming language.
LeCun withYoshua BengioandGeoffrey Hintontogether received the 2018 Turing Award (often called the "Nobel Prize of computing") for their work on deep learning. These three are sometimes called the "fathers of artificial intelligence" and the "fathers of deep learning."
Biography
Yang Likun was born in 1960 near Paris, France. In 1983, he obtained an engineer's degree from the École Supérieure d'Ingénieurs en Électronique et Électrotechnique in Paris, and in 1987 he obtained a doctorate in computer science from the University of Paris VI. During his doctoral studies, he proposed the prototype of the backpropagation learning algorithm for neural networks. He then completed postdoctoral work at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Geoffrey Hinton.
In 1988, Yang Likun joined the Adaptive Systems Research Department at Bell Labs in Holmdel Township, New Jersey, USA. The head of the laboratory was Lawrence D. Jackel. There, he developed many new machine learning methods, such as the model for image recognition called convolutional neural networks, Optimal Brain Damage, and the Graph Transformer Networks method (similar to conditional random fields), which he applied to handwriting recognition and OCR.
The bank check recognition system he helped develop was widely used by NCR and other companies, and the system read more than 10% of all checks in the United States from the late 1990s to the early 21st century.
In 1996, he joined AT&T Labs and became the head of the image processing research department, which was part of the speech and image processing research laboratory led by Lawrence Rabiner. The main work was DjVu image compression technology, which was used by websites led by the Internet Archive to publish scanned documents. His AT&T colleagues included Léon Bottou and Vladimir Vapnik.
In 2012, he became the founding director of the Center for Data Science at New York University. On December 9, 2013, Yang Likun became the first director of the Facebook (now Meta) Artificial Intelligence Research Institute in New York, and in early 2014 gradually withdrew from the leadership of NYU-CDS.
You can visit his personal websitehttp://yann.lecun.com/to learn more information