A Pioneer in Artificial Intelligence
Yann André LeCun (born July 8, 1960) is a French-American computer scientist specializing in machine learning, computer vision, mobile robotics, and computational neuroscience. He is the Silver Professor at NYU's Courant Institute and the Chief AI Scientist at Meta.
LeCun is renowned for his work on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and optical character recognition. He is also a co-creator of DjVu image compression technology and the Lush programming language.
In 2018, he, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton received the Turing Award for their pioneering work in deep learning, earning them the title "Godfathers of AI."
LeCun was born on July 8, 1960, in Soisy-sous-Montmorency, France. He received a Diplôme d'Ingénieur from ESIEE Paris in 1983 and a PhD in Computer Science from Sorbonne University in 1987, where he proposed an early back-propagation algorithm for neural networks.
He later conducted postdoctoral research under Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto in 1987.
In 1988, LeCun joined AT&T Bell Labs, where he developed CNNs and various machine learning methods, such as Optimal Brain Damage and Graph Transformer Networks. His work on handwriting and bank check recognition systems became widely deployed in the US.
In 2003, he joined NYU as a professor and later became the founding director of the NYU Center for Data Science. In 2013, he became the first director of Meta AI Research in New York.
LeCun is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the French Académie des Sciences. He has received numerous honorary doctorates and awards, including the 2018 Turing Award, the IEEE Neural Network Pioneer Award (2014), and the Princess of Asturias Award (2022).
In 2023, he was named a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour and received the Global Swiss AI Award during the World Economic Forum in Davos.