Facebook's AI director talks smarter News Feeds and talent wars with Google

Professor Yann LeCun is a force to be reckoned with in the world of artificial intelligence. With approximately 20 years in the field, the director of Facebook's AI lab has authored over 180 academic papers. One of his most notable pieces of work came in 1988, when he helped to develop a piece of AI software known as a "convolutional neural network" that could recognise handwritten numbers. Trained on a data set of thousands of characters, this revolutionary system detected visual patterns directly from the pixel. Essentially, it let computers open their eyes and use data to learn on their own.