Meet the Researcher: Yann LeCun

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YannLeCunDr. Yann LeCun is a well-known luminary in the field of machine learning and is currently Professor of Computer Science at NYU.  His main research interests are Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Mobile Robotics, and Computational Neuroscience. He is also interested in Data Compression, Digital Libraries, the Physics of Computation, and all the applications of machine learning (Vision, Speech, Language, Document understanding, Data Mining, Bioinformatics). His research papers can be reviewed on arXiv.org.

On Tuesday Facebook announced it hired machine learning pioneer Yann LeCun to run its newly created artificial intelligence lab. Scooping up one of the biggest names in the field is a major move for the company, but it’s not a surprising one. If anything, Facebook is late to enter to the data science arms race that’s underway in Silicon Valley and around the country.

I am thrilled to announce that I have accepted the position of director of this new lab. I will remain a professor at New York University on a part-time basis, and will maintain research and teaching activities at NYU,” said Professor LeCun.

Facebook’s AI lab will work on improving its News Feed feature, which is quickly becoming unwieldy as users pile up friends and likes. Cognitive computers don’t just gather up data, but can infer information that isn’t explicitly stated, and use it to make future predictions. That makes it easier to give users what they want. It’s why you can search through your photos that aren’t tagged, for example. It also lets markets better understand consumer behavior for more targeted ads.

 

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