Yann LeCun received the Electrical Engineer Diploma from Ecole Superieure d'Ingenieurs en Electrotechnique et Electronique (ESIEE), Paris in 1983, and a PhD in Computer Science from Universite Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris) in 1987. After a postdoc at the University of Toronto, he joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, NJ in 1988. He became head of the Image Processing Research Department at AT&T Labs-Research in 1996, and joined NYU as a professor in 2003, after a brief period as a Fellow of the NEC Research Institute in Princeton. From 2012 to 2014 he directed NYU's initiative in data science and became the founding director of the NYU Center for Data Science. He was named Director of AI Research at Facebook in late 2013 and retains a part-time position on the NYU faculty.
Tomaso A. Poggio is the Eugene McDermott Professor in the Dept. of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at MIT and the director of the new NSF Center for Brains, Minds and Machines at MIT of which MIT and Harvard are members among other Institutions. He is a member of both the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and of the McGovern Brain Institute. He is an honorary member of the Neuroscience Research Program, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Founding Fellow of AAAI and a founding member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. Among other honors he received the Laurea Honoris Causa from the University of Pavia for the Volta Bicentennial, the 2003 Gabor Award, the Okawa Prize 2009, and the AAAS Fellowship. He is one of the most cited computational scientists with contributions ranging from the biophysical and behavioral studies of the visual system to the computational analyses of vision and learning in humans and machines. With W. Reichardt he characterized quantitatively the visuo-motor control system in the fly. With D. Marr, he formulated the seminal idea of levels of analysis in computational neuroscience. He introduced regularization as a mathematical framework to approach the ill-posed problems of vision and the key problem of learning from data. In the last decade he has developed an influential quantitative model of visual recognition in the visual cortex. The citation for the recent 2009 Okawa prize mentions his "...outstanding contributions to the establishment of computational neuroscience, and pioneering researches ranging from the biophysical and behavioral studies of the visual system to the computational analysis of vision and learning in humans and machines." His research has always been interdisciplinary, between brains and computers. It is now focused on the mathematics of learning theory, the applications of learning techniques to computer vision and especially on computational neuroscience of the visual cortex. A former Corporate Fellow of Thinking Machines Corporation, he was a director of PHZ Capital Partners, Inc., and was involved in starting, or investing in, several other high tech companies including Arris Pharmaceutical, nFX, Imagen, Digital Persona and Deep Mind.
Yaniv Taigman graduated from Tel-Aviv University with a Master’s in Computer Science. During the time of starting his PhD research, he co-founded Face.com where he held the position of CTO. When Face.com was acquired by Facebook in 2012, he joined the office in Menlo Park where he currently leads research and engineering projects aimed at tagging media content, in particular faces in photos.