LeCun was born on 8 July 1960, at Soisy-sous-Montmorency in the suburbs of Paris. His name was originally spelled Le Cun from the old Breton form Le Cunff and was from the region of Guingamp in northern Brittany. "Yann" is the Breton form for "John".[2]
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,[15] the "Optimal Brain Damage" regularisation methods,[16] and the Graph Transformer Networks method (similar to conditional random field), which he applied to handwriting recognition and OCR.[17] 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]
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,[18] used by many websites, notably the Internet Archive, to distribute scanned documents.[citation needed] His collaborators at AT&T include Léon Bottou and Vladimir Vapnik.
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 Mathematics[27] at UCLA. He is the Co-Director of the Learning in Machines and Brain research program (formerly Neural Computation & Adaptive Perception) of CIFAR.[28]
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).[29] In 2023, he was named as the inaugural Jacob T. Schwartz Chaired Professor in Computer Science at NYU's Courant Institute.[30] LeCun is also a scientific advisor to French research group Kyutai which is being funded by Xavier Niel, Rodolphe Saadé, Eric Schmidt, and others.[31]
He has received honorary doctorates from IPN in Mexico City[33] in 2016, from EPFL[34][35] in 2018, from Université Côte d'Azur in 2021,[36] from Università di Siena in 2023,[37] and from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2023.
In 2018, LeCun was awarded the IRI Medal, established by the Industrial Research Institute (IRI),[39] and the Harold Pender Award, given by the University of Pennsylvania,[40]
^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.
^Yann LeCun, J. S. Denker, S. Solla, R. E. Howard and L. D. Jackel: Optimal Brain Damage, in Touretzky, David (Eds), Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 2 (NIPS*89), Morgan Kaufmann, Denver, CO, 1990.
^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.
^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.
^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
^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.
^"News from the National Academy of Sciences". 26 April 2021. Retrieved 4 July 2021. 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:"Member Directory". National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved 4 July 2021.
^"PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award". IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. 24 August 2023. Retrieved 15 February 2024.
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