Facebook's Quest to Build an Artificial Brain Depends on This Guy

Abstraction: Yann LeCun pioneers convolutional neural networks and leads Facebook AI lab

Key points:

• Zuckerberg recruited LeCun to run Facebook AI Research (FAIR); IEEE gave LeCun Neural Network Pioneer Award
• LeNet (Bell Labs, 1993) was the first practical convolutional net: read handwritten digits on bank checks
• Convolutional nets reuse spatial filters across image locations, making them scalable and memory-efficient
• Stochastic gradient descent emerged as a "hack" due to weak French hardware; calculates error per example rather than batch average
• Backpropagation formalized by Hinton/Rumelhart/Williams in 1986 Nature paper; LeCun independently developed similar approach
• Companies deploying convnets in 2014: Google (Android voice), Baidu (visual search), Microsoft, Twitter

Connections: Yann LeCun · Facebook · Geoffrey Hinton · Google · Baidu · Deep Learning · Convolutional Neural Networks · Backpropagation · Stochastic Gradient Descent

Source: http://www.wired.com/2014/08/deep-learning-yann-lecun/