Yann LeCun

Yann LeCun is the Executive Chairman of AMI Labs and the Jacob T. Schwartz Professor at NYU affiliated with the Courant Institute Courant Institute - School of Mathematics, Computer Science, and Data Science. He was the Chief AI Scientist at Meta (2018-2025), the founding Director of Facebook AI Research (2013-2017) and of the NYU Center for Data Science (2011-2014). He received an EE Diploma from ESIEE (Paris) in 1983, and a PhD in Computer Science from Sorbonne Université (Paris) in 1987. After a postdoc at the University of Toronto, he joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1988. He became head of the Image Processing Research Department at AT&T Labs-Research in 1996, and joined NYU in 2003 after a short tenure as a fellow of the NEC Research Institute. In late 2013, LeCun became Director of AI Research at Facebook, while remaining on the NYU Faculty part-time. He was visiting professor at Collège de France in 2016. His research interests include machine learning and artificial intelligence, with applications to computer vision, natural language understanding, robotics, and computational neuroscience. He is best known for his work in deep learning and the invention of the convolutional network method which is widely used for image, video and speech recognition. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and the French Académie des Sciences, a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, a fellow of AAAI and AAAS, the recipient of the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, the 2024 VinFuture Grand Prize, 2022 Princess of Asturias Award, the 2014 IEEE Neural Network Pioneer Award, the 2015 IEEE Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence Distinguished Researcher Award, the 2016 Lovie Award for Lifetime Achievement, the University of Pennsylvania Pender Award, and honorary doctorates from IPN, Mexico, EPFL, Université Côte d’Azur, HKUST, and Université de Genève. He is the recipient of the 2018 ACM Turing Award (with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio).