The Power and Limits of Deep Learning with Yann LeCun

July 11, 2019

Deep Learning (DL) has enabled significant progress in computer perception, natural language understanding, and control. Almost all these successes rely on supervised learning, where the machine is required to predict human-provided annotations, or model-free reinforcement learning, where the machine learns policies that maximize rewards. Supervised learning paradigms have been extremely successful for an increasingly large number of practical applications such as medical image analysis, autonomous driving, virtual assistants, information filtering, ranking, search and retrieval, language translation, and many more. Today, DL systems are at the core of search engines and social networks. DL is also used increasingly widely in the physical and social sciences to analyze data in astrophysics, particle physics, and biology, or to build phenomenological models of complex systems. An interesting example is the use of convolutional networks as computational models of human and animal perception. But while supervised DL excels at perceptual tasks, there are two major challenges to the next quantum leap in AI: (1) getting DL systems to learn tasks without requiring large amounts of human-labeled data; (2) getting them to learn to reason and to act. These challenges motivate some the most interesting research directions in AI.

Yann LeCun

Yann LeCun is VP and Chief AI Scientist at Facebook and Silver Professor at NYU affiliated with the Courant Institute and the Center for Data Science. He was the founding Director of Facebook AI Research and of the NYU Center for Data Science. He received an EE Diploma from ESIEE (Paris) in 1983 and a PhD in Computer Science from Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris) in 1987. After a postdoc at the University of Toronto, he joined AT&T Bell Laboratories. 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 at 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 Engineering, the recipient of 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 and EPFL. He is the recipient of the 2018 ACM Turing Award (with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio) for "conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing."