Q&A: The Network Effect

Deep learning might be a booming field these days, but few people remember its time in the intellectual wilderness better than Yann LeCun, director of Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) and a part-time professor at New York University. LeCun developed convolutional neural networks while a researcher at Bell Laboratories in the late 1980s. Now, the group he leads at Facebook is using them to improve computer vision, to make predictions in the face of uncertainty, and even to understand natural language. Your work at FAIR ranges from long-term theoretical research to applications that have real product impact.