Computer Vision News - November 2018

Yann, you have had a major impact on the artificial intelligence field in the last couple of decades. Can you tell us how you got to where you are today? I’ve been interested in AI since I was very little. I was fascinated by the general concept of intelligence. Not just machine intelligence, but intelligence in general. I always thought that learning was an essential part of intelligence. I studied electrical engineering and discovered during my studies that people had been working on learning machines back in the ‘60s and ‘50s. I learned that a little bit by accident and started reading all the literature about it when I was still an undergrad. It got me thinking that I want to do research on this, so I did a couple of projects when I was at school, and then decided that I should study it. I found a bunch of people in France who were working on something called Automata Networks that were vaguely related. We’re talking about 1983 or so. Nobody at that time in computer Yann LeCun is Vice President and Chief AI Scientist at Facebook. He is also a Professor of Computer Science and Data Science at New York University. 4 Yann LeCun Computer Vision News “I was fascinated by the general concept of intelligence!” Guest