Yann LeCun is a researcher in artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision and robotics, and a graduate of the École supérieure d'ingénieurs en électronique et électrotechnique (ESIEE) in Paris and the Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie. He became a researcher at Bell Laboratories in 1988 and was appointed Department Director at AT&T Laboratories in 1996.

For the past 30 years, he has been working on "machine learning" and "deeplearning", i.e. the ability of a computer to recognize representations (images, texts, videos, sounds) by repeatedly showing them to it. He also contributed to the development of image compression methods with the DjVu archiving format.

He has published nearly 200 articles and papers on machine learning, neural networks and image recognition, fields in which he is considered one of the pioneers. Yann LeCun is a professor at New York University and Director of Facebook AI Research (FAIR), Facebook's new Paris-based European research center dedicated to artificial intelligence. He is the winner of the 2018 Turing Award.