Yann André Le Cun is a French–American computer scientist working in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, robotics and image compression. He is the Jacob T. Schwartz Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. He served as Chief AI Scientist at Meta Platforms before leaving to work on his own startup company.
He is well known for his work on optical character recognition and computer vision using convolutional neural networks (CNNs). He is also one of the main creators of the DjVu image compression technology, alongside Léon Bottou and Patrick Haffner. He co-developed the Lush programming language with Léon Bottou.
In 2018, LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for their work on deep learning. The four (including Jürgen Schmidhuber
) are sometimes referred to as the "Godfathers of AI" and "Godfathers of Deep Learning".