Database Reference
In-Depth Information
3
Yann LeCun
Facebook
Yann LeCun
is the Director of AI Research at Facebook, the world's largest social
networking service. Facebook's core business is to facilitate communication among
people and between people and the digital world. The technology required to sup-
port this mission is immense given the sheer scale of data involved. As of 2014,
Facebook had over 1.3 billion active users (with more than 150 billion connections
among each other) and 829 million unique daily logins. On an average day, these
users uploaded around 350 million photos, shared around 4.75 billion items, and
sent around 10 billion messages. The availability of these streaming data sets is so
large that, for the most part, Facebook's systems only have time to look at any piece
of data just once. Such activity levels bring with them a unique set of challenges: how
best to make sense of and understand all the data, and how then to use this intel-
ligence to make decisions.
Prior to joining Facebook, LeCun was and continues to be the Silver Professor of
Computer Science, Neural Science, and Electrical and Computer Engineering at New
York
University, where he is the founding director of the NYU Center for Data
Science. After his postdoc work in Geoff Hinton's group at the University of Toronto
developing the theory of
artificial neural networks with back-propagation, he joined
AT&T Bell Labs, where he later became the head of the Image Processing Research
Department. LeCun then worked briefly as a Fellow of the
NEC Research Institute
in Princeton before joining NYU in 2003. Over his career to date, he has published
more than 180 technical papers and book chapters on machine learning, computer
vision, handwriting recognition, image processing and compression, and neural net-
works. He is particularly well known for his work on
deep learning methods, which
are used by companies to understand images, video, documents, human-computer
interactions, and speech.
