Facebook's New Head of Artificial Intelligence

 Artificial Intelligence  

Facebook wants to be a leader in artificial intelligence, speech recognition and machine learning, and recently hired New York University's Yann LeCun to head up these efforts.

Y ann LeCun, Facebook's new head of artificial intelligence is a computer science researcher with contributions in machine learning, computer vision, mobile robotics and computational neuroscience.

He is well known for his work on optical character recognition and computer vision using convolutional neural networks. French-born LeCun is also one of the main creators of the DjVu image compression technology (together with Léon Bottou and Patrick Haffner). He co-developed the Lush programming language with Léon Bottou.

Related articles Dennis Hong On Robot Evolution and The DARPA Robotics Challenge  Boston Dynamic's Big Dog Gets An Arm For A Head  The What, Why, How, Who and When of the DARPA Robotics Challenge

On his new role, LeCun recently told Wired,

The goal is really long-term, more long-term than work that is currently taking place at Facebook. It’s going to be somewhat isolated from the day-to-day production, if you will — so that we give people some breathing room to think ahead. When you solve big problems like this, technology always comes out of it, along the way, that’s pretty useful.

There is speculation that the goal of the artificial intelligence efforts at Facebook are to use its vast trove of consumer data to power intelligent search and response software that can speak with you the way the computers do on Star Trek.

The segment below recently was aired on Bloomberg and is part of a series on AI hosted by Sam Grobart. 

By 33rd Square

Subscribe to 33rd Square