Yann LeCun is a French-American computer scientist and a Silver Professor at New York University, affiliated with the NYU Center for Data Science and the Courant Institute. His NYU faculty page also lists his role as Director of AI Research at Facebook, the company now known as Meta.
LeCun is best known for developing convolutional neural networks, the architecture that learns visual features directly from images. In the late 1980s and 1990s he applied these networks to recognizing handwritten digits, and his LeNet systems were deployed to read checks at scale, an early commercial success for deep learning.
Convolutional networks went on to become the foundation of modern computer vision, powering image recognition systems worldwide. LeCun’s long advocacy for neural approaches, through periods when they were unfashionable, helped set the stage for the deep learning revolution of the 2010s.