People
Yann Ollivier
Research Scientist
After a PhD in probability and group theory, I joined the CNRS, the French national research institute. Initially I worked on unveiling connections between probability, Markov chains, differential geometry and discrete geometry. For this work I was awarded the bronze medal of the CNRS in 2011.
I’ve had a lifelong interest in artificial intelligence, and around 2010 I decided to focus my research on machine learning. At that point I joined the computer science department at Paris-Sud university. Following the industrial development of deep learning, in 2017 I joined Meta AI Research. In the long term, I am interested in building general artificial intelligence systems. In the shorter term I work on understanding and improving the learning algorithms for neural networks. More specific fields of interest include the geometry of gradient descent algorithms, the dynamics of recurrent networks and online learning, better algorithms for reinforcement learning, and what “learning” means in terms of information theory.