Yann LeCun Wins A.M Turing Award, Computing’s Highest Honor

Yann LeCun, an NYU professor and a frequent visitor to NYU Shanghai, was named a 2018 AM Turing Award winner by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) on March 27.

The Silver Professor of Computer Science at the NYU Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences shares the honor with University of Montreal professor Yoshua Bengio and Google VP and engineering fellow Geoffrey Hinton. In announcing the award, ACM called the three computer scientists “the Fathers of the Deep Learning Revolution,” and cited “conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing.”

LeCun is a familiar face at NYU Shanghai. In March 2017, he visited Century Avenue to give a public talk on Predictive Learning and the Future of AI. The standing-room-only talk, organized by NYU Shanghai’s Center for Data Science and AI, argued that a key component of progress in AI is the ability of machines to learn predictive models of the world. LeCun also returned to Shanghai in June of that year to participate in a brain and AI workshop held by the Center for Data Science and AI at NYU Shanghai.
 

Professor LeCun gives a lecture on machine learning at NYU Shanghai

“Not only has LeCun’s work had a tremendous impact on our daily lives, but he also remains a highly active and influential researcher. We are very fortunate to have him at NYU,” said Keith Ross, Dean of Engineering and Computer Science at NYU Shanghai. Ross and NYU Shanghai Computer Science Professor Zhang Zheng are part of the CILVR Lab (Computational Intelligence, Learning, Vision, and Robotics) founded by Yann LeCun.

LeCun’s contributions to the field of computer science have been incorporated into NYU Shanghai’s curriculum as well. Students in a popular Machine Learning course, for instance, study convolutional networks developed by LeCun.

This summer, Alfredo Canziani, a postdoctoral research scientist from LeCun’s lab, will deliver a workshop titled Prediction and Policy-Learning Under Uncertainty at NYU Shanghai. Canziani will share the scientific achievements he has made under the supervision of LeCun and professor KyungHyun Cho.

The Turing Award is also known as the “Nobel Prize of Computing.” It is named after Alan Turing, the English mathematician who formalized the concept of algorithm and computation by inventing the Turing machine, the earliest model of an artificial computer. LeCun, who is also a founding director of NYU’s Center for Data Science and a vice president and chief AI scientist at Facebook, will share the $1 million prize with co-winners Bengio and Hinton.