Yann LeCun is the Chief AI scientist at the Facebook AI Research (FAIR) group.

LeCun, originally from the suburbs of Paris, was one of the founding researchers of convolutional neural networks at AT&T Bell Laboratory in 1988. Convolutional neural networks, which introduced recursive relationships and layers to the math operations performed in neural networks, have become a cornerstone of deep learning in the decades since.

An early network successfully recognized hand written zip codes in imagery, and was used by banks to automatically recognize portions of hand-written checks.

LeCun went on to become a professor at New York University. He joined Facebook in 2013.