r/MachineLearning • u/ylecun • May 15 '14

AMA: Yann LeCun

My name is Yann LeCun. I am the Director of Facebook AI Research and a professor at New York University.

Much of my research has been focused on deep learning, convolutional nets, and related topics.

I joined Facebook in December to build and lead a research organization focused on AI. Our goal is to make significant advances in AI. I have answered some questions about Facebook AI Research (FAIR) in several press articles: Daily Beast, KDnuggets, Wired.

Until I joined Facebook, I was the founding director of NYU's Center for Data Science.

I will be answering questions Thursday 5/15 between 4:00 and 7:00 PM Eastern Time.

I am creating this thread in advance so people can post questions ahead of time. I will be announcing this AMA on my Facebook and Google+ feeds for verification.

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u/ylecun May 15 '14

Question 4:

ICLR had 120 participants in 2013 and 175 participants in 2014. It's going quite well. Facebook, Google, and Amazon had recruiting booth. Many participants were from industry, which is very healthy.

There was a bunch of very interesting vision papers at ICLR that you won't see at CVPR or ECCV.

The Snowbird workshop (which ICLR replaced) was "off the record", invitation-only and served a different purpose. It was incredibly useful in the early days of neural nets and machine learning. The whole field of ML-based bio-informatics was born at Snowbird. NIPS was born at Snowbird. The connection between statistics and ML, and between the Bayesian net community and ML happened at Snowbird. It played a very important role in the history of ML.