Leon Bottou

I received the Diplôme d’Ingénieur de l’École Polytechnique (X84) in 1987, the Magistère de Mathématiques Fondamentales et Appliquées et d’Informatique from École Normale Superieure in 1988, and a PhD in computer science from Université de Paris-Sud in 1991. I went to AT&T Bell Laboratories, AT&T Labs, NEC Labs America and Microsoft Research. I joined the Facebook AI Research in March 2015.

The long term goal of my research is to understand how to build human-level intelligence. Although reaching this goal requires conceptual advances that cannot be anticipated at this point, it certainly entails clarifying how to learn and how to reason. My best known contributions are my work on “deep” neural networks in the 1990s, large scale learning in the 2000s, and possibly my more recent work on causal inference in learning systems. I am also known for the DjVu document compression technology.

Interests

AI, machine learning, optimization, computer vision, signal processing, natural language processing and data compression