We are pleased to announce Yann LeCun, Director of AI Research at Facebook, has been elected into the National Academy of Engineering. Election to the National Academy of Engineering is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer, and honors individuals who have made outstanding contributions to engineering research, practice, or education.

Yann’s contributions developing convolutional neural networks and their applications in computer vision and other areas of artificial intelligence are form the basis of many products and services deployed across most technology companies today.  He is also one of the main creators of the DjVu image compression technology (together with Léon Bottou and Patrick Haffner), and co-developed the Lush programming language with Léon Bottou.

LeCun is also the recipient of the 2014 IEEE Neural Network Pioneer Award and the 2015 PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award.

While membership into the NAE is major recognition of Yann’s career to-date, he continues to push forward with new advances in AI.  “Much of our work at Facebook AI focuses on devising new theories, principles, methods, and systems to make machines understand images, video, speech, and language—and then to reason about them,” said LeCun in a recent interview.  “AI is going to bring major shifts in society through developments in self-driving cars, medical image analysis, better medical diagnosis, and personalized medicine.”

LeCun along with Joaquin Quinonero Candela, Director of Facebook Applied Machine Learning, recently shared their thoughts on the future of AI as the backbone of many of the most innovative apps and services of tomorrow https://research.fb.com/artificial-intelligence-revealed/.