Yann LeCun is a French-American computer scientist known for his pioneering work in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computer vision. Born on July 8, 1960, in France, he completed his engineering degree at ESIEE Paris and earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Université Pierre et Marie Curie. His early research focused on neural networks and helped advance the back-propagation algorithm.
LeCun's groundbreaking contributions came during his time at Bell Labs in the late 1980s, where he developed convolutional neural networks (CNNs). His creation of the LeNet architecture was instrumental in the field of optical character recognition, particularly for systems that process handwritten checks. At its peak, his technology was used to read a significant portion of checks in the United States.
In 2003, LeCun joined New York University as a professor and later founded the Center for Data Science. In 2013, he took on the role of Director of AI Research at Facebook, where he is now Vice President and Chief AI Scientist at Meta.
For his contributions to deep learning, LeCun was awarded the prestigious Turing Award in 2018, alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. The trio is often referred to as the "Godfathers of AI" for their transformative impact on the field.
