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Léon-Yves Bottou (; born 1965) is a researcher best known for his work in
machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...
and
data compression In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compressi ...
. His work presents
stochastic gradient descent Stochastic gradient descent (often abbreviated SGD) is an Iterative method, iterative method for optimizing an objective function with suitable smoothness properties (e.g. Differentiable function, differentiable or Subderivative, subdifferentiable ...
as a fundamental learning algorithm. He is also one of the main creators of the DjVu image compression technology (together with
Yann LeCun Yann André Le Cun ( , ; usually spelled LeCun; born 8 July 1960) is a French-American computer scientist working primarily in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, mobile robotics and computational neuroscience. He is the Silver Pr ...
and Patrick Haffner), and the maintainer o
DjVuLibre
the open source implementation of DjVu. He is the original developer of the Lush programming language.


Life

Léon Bottou was born in France in 1965. He obtained the
Diplôme d'Ingénieur The ''Diplôme d'Ingénieur'' (, often abbreviated as ''Dipl.Ing.'') is a postgraduate degree in engineering ''(see Engineer's Degrees in Europe)'' usually awarded by the '' Grandes Écoles'' in engineering. It is generally obtained after five to ...
from
École Polytechnique (, ; also known as Polytechnique or l'X ) is a ''grande école'' located in Palaiseau, France. It specializes in science and engineering and is a founding member of the Polytechnic Institute of Paris. The school was founded in 1794 by mat ...
in 1987, a Magistère de Mathématiques Fondamentales et Appliquées et d’Informatique from
École Normale Supérieure École or Ecole may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by Secondary education in France, secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing i ...
in 1988, a Diplôme d'Études Approndies in Computer Science in 1988, in 1988, and a PhD from Université Paris-Sud in 1991. His master's thesis concerned using Time Delay Neural Networks for
speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also ...
. He then joined the Adaptive Systems Research Department at
AT&T AT&T Inc., an abbreviation for its predecessor's former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the w ...
Bell Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the company operates several lab ...
in
Holmdel, New Jersey Holmdel is a township in Monmouth County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. Located near Raritan Bay in the Raritan Valley Region, the township is a regional commercial hub of Central Jersey, home to Bell Labs and PNC Bank Arts Center, and a ...
, where he collaborated with Vladimir Vapnik on local learning algorithms. in 1992, he returned to France and founded Neuristique S.A., a company that produced machine learning tools and one of the first data mining software packages. In 1995, he returned to Bell Laboratories, where he developed a number of new machine learning methods, such as Graph Transformer Networks (similar to
conditional random field Conditional random fields (CRFs) are a class of statistical modeling methods often applied in pattern recognition and machine learning and used for structured prediction. Whereas a classifier predicts a label for a single sample without consi ...
), and applied them to handwriting recognition and OCR. The bank check recognition system that he helped develop was widely deployed by NCR and other companies, reading over 10% of all the checks in the US in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In 1996, he joined
AT&T Labs AT&T Labs, Inc. (formerly AT&T Laboratories, Inc.) is the research & development division of AT&T, the telecommunications company. It employs some 1,800 people in various locations, including: Bedminster, New Jersey; Middletown Township, New J ...
and worked primarily on the DjVu image compression technology, that is used by some websites, notably the
Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...
, to distribute scanned documents. Between 2002 and 2010, he was a research scientist at NEC Laboratories in
Princeton, New Jersey The Municipality of Princeton is a Borough (New Jersey), borough in Mercer County, New Jersey, United States. It was established on January 1, 2013, through the consolidation of the Borough of Princeton, New Jersey, Borough of Princeton and Pri ...
, where he focused on the theory and practice of machine learning with large-scale datasets, on-line learning, and stochastic optimization methods. He developed the open source software LaSVM for fast large-scale
support vector machine In machine learning, support vector machines (SVMs, also support vector networks) are supervised max-margin models with associated learning algorithms that analyze data for classification and regression analysis. Developed at AT&T Bell Laborato ...
, and
stochastic gradient descent Stochastic gradient descent (often abbreviated SGD) is an Iterative method, iterative method for optimizing an objective function with suitable smoothness properties (e.g. Differentiable function, differentiable or Subderivative, subdifferentiable ...
software for training linear SVM and Conditional Random Fields. In 2010 he joined the Microsoft adCenter in
Redmond, Washington Redmond is a city in King County, Washington, United States, located east of Seattle. The population was 73,256 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. Redmond is best known as the home of Microsoft and Nintendo of America. The city h ...
, and in 2012 became a Principal Researcher at
Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...
in New York City. In March 2015 he joined Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research, also in New York City, as a research lead. His work in gradient descent argued that both stochastic gradient descent and batch gradient descent reach similar levels of loss with the same number of training samples, but SGD is faster when running on large datasets. He also argued that second-order gradient descent methods, such as
quasi-Newton methods In numerical analysis, a quasi-Newton method is an Iterative method, iterative numerical method used either to Root-finding algorithm, find zeroes or to Mathematical optimization, find local maxima and minima of functions via an iterative recurren ...
, can be beneficial compared to plain SGD. See (Bottou et al 2018) for a review. He was program chair of the 2013 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems and the 2009
International Conference on Machine Learning The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) is a leading international academic conference in machine learning. Along with NeurIPS and ICLR, it is one of the three primary conferences of high impact in machine learning and artificial ...
. He is an associate editor of the
IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) organization, 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. The IEEE ...
's '' Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence'', the IAPR's '' Pattern Recognition Letters'' and the independently published '' Journal of Machine Learning Research''. In 2007, he was received one of the first
Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists was established in 2007 through a partnership between the Blavatnik Family Foundation, headed by Leonard Blavatnik (Russian: Леонид Валентинович Блаватник), chairman of Access Indu ...
from the Blavatnik Family Foundation and the
New York Academy of Sciences The New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS), originally founded as the Lyceum of Natural History in January 1817, is a nonprofit professional society based in New York City, with more than 20,000 members from 100 countries. It is the fourth-oldes ...
.


References


External links


Léon Bottou's personal website
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Bottou, Leon 1965 births Living people Machine learning researchers French computer scientists 20th-century French mathematicians 21st-century French mathematicians French statisticians Free software programmers Scientists at Bell Labs École Polytechnique alumni École Normale Supérieure alumni