Yann LeCun was born in France and grew up in the outskirts of Paris. He received an engineering diploma from ESIEE (Paris) and a PhD from Sorbonne Université. He immigrated to the United States to join AT&T Bell Labs, where he became head of image processing research. LeCun joined NYU as a professor in 2003 and was founding director of the NYU Center for Data Science. He joined Meta/Facebook in 2013 and is now vice president and chief AI scientist for Facebook AI Research (FAIR).
LeCun’s interests include AI (artificial intelligence), machine learning, computer perception, robotics, and computational neuroscience. He does not believe that AI is something to fear. “There’s no question that machines will eventually be smarter than humans,” he said in a Wired interview. “It will be like working with a staff of super smart people. They just won’t be people. Humans feel threatened by this, but I think we should feel excited.”
LeCun is the recipient of the 2018 ACM Turing Award (with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio) for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (U.S.), the National Academy of Engineering (U.S.), and the Académie des Sciences (France). A fellow of AAAI and AAAS, he is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, the 2022 Princess of Asturias Award, the 2014 IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Award, the 2016 Lovie Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the University of Pennsylvania Harold Pender Award.
