Léon Bottou (born 1965) is a researcher best known for his work in

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

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 compressio ...

. His work presents

stochastic gradient descent Stochastic gradient descent (often abbreviated SGD) is an iterative method for optimizing an objective function with suitable smoothness properties (e.g. differentiable or subdifferentiable). It can be regarded as a stochastic approximation of ...

as a fundamental learning algorithm. He is also one of the main creators of the

DjVu DjVu ( , like French " déjà vu") is a computer file format designed primarily to store scanned documents, especially those containing a combination of text, line drawings, indexed color images, and photographs. It uses technologies such as im ...

image compression technology (together with Yann LeCun 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 seven ye ...

from

École Polytechnique École may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région Île-de-France * École, Savoi ...

in 1987, a Magistère de Mathématiques Fondamentales et Appliquées et d’Informatique from

École Normale Supérieure École may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région Île-de-France * École, S ...

in 1988 and a PhD from

Université Paris-Sud Paris-Sud University (French: ''Université Paris-Sud''), also known as University of Paris — XI (or as Université d'Orsay before 1971), was a French research university distributed among several campuses in the southern suburbs of Paris, i ...

in 1991. He then joined the Adaptive Systems Research Department at

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile ...

Bell Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial Research and development, research and scientific developm ...

in Holmdel, New Jersey, where he collaborated with

Vladimir Vapnik Vladimir Naumovich Vapnik (russian: Владимир Наумович Вапник; born 6 December 1936) is one of the main developers of the Vapnik–Chervonenkis theory of statistical learning, and the co-inventor of the support-vector machin ...

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), 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 is the research & development division of AT&T, the telecommunications company. It employs some 1,800 people in various locations, including: Bedminster NJ; Middletown, NJ; Manhattan, NY; Warrenville, IL; Austin, TX; Dallas, TX; Atl ...

and worked primarily on the

image compression technology, that is used by some websites, notably the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

, to distribute scanned documents. Between 2002 and 2010, he was a research scientist at NEC Laboratories in

Princeton, New Jersey Princeton is a municipality with a borough form of government in Mercer County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. It was established on January 1, 2013, through the consolidation of the Borough of Princeton and Princeton Township, both of w ...

, 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 learning models with associated learning algorithms that analyze data for classification and regression analysis. Developed at AT&T Bell Laborat ...

, and

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 census, up from 54,144 in 2010. Redmond is best known as the home of Microsoft and Nintendo of America. With an ann ...

, 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 technolog ...

in New York City. In March 2015 he joined Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research, also in New York City, as a research lead. He was program chair of the 2013

Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems The Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems (abbreviated as NeurIPS and formerly NIPS) is a machine learning and computational neuroscience conference held every December. The conference is currently a double-track meet ...

and the 2009

International Conference on Machine Learning The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) is the 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 artific ...

. He is an associate editor of the

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operati ...

's '' Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence'', the IAPR's '' Pattern Recognition Letters'' and the independently published ''

Journal of Machine Learning Research The ''Journal of Machine Learning Research'' is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal covering machine learning. It was established in 2000 and the first editor-in-chief was Leslie Kaelbling. The current editors-in-chief are Francis Bac ...

''. In 2007, he was received one of the first Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists from the Blavatnik Family Foundation and the

New York Academy of Sciences The New York Academy of Sciences (originally the Lyceum of Natural History) was founded in January 1817 as the Lyceum of Natural History. It is the fourth oldest scientific society in the United States. An independent, nonprofit organization wi ...

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