Yann LeCun was honored at the Consulate General of France in New York. Credit: Facebook / Yann LeCun

"Now I have to be more careful not to say nonsense because no one dares to tell me I'm wrong"Yann LeCun jokes. And for good reason, just two months ago, he was awarded the prestigious Turing 2018 Award, nicknamed the "Nobel Prize for Computing" by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

This artificial intelligence guru, director of Facebook's artificial intelligence programs when he is not in his research suit at New York University, was honored for his work during a tribute evening Thursday, May 30 at the Consulate General of France in New York.

In line with Alan Turing, one of the fathers of computing in the twentieth century who gave his name to the ACM award, Yann LeCun devotes his research to "deep learning", a set of methods to allow to a machine "to learn" by itself thanks to a network of artificial neurons on the model of the human brain.

The stake, which the scientist recalled facing a packed house: "Let the machines learn a little bit like animals and humans, with little data, few tests and few mistakes. In the end, what we would like are machines that have as much sense as a gutter cat. "

To achieve this, Yann LeCun works on "Self-supervised learning". "It consists of giving the machine a given piece, for example a video clip, and to hide part of this clip and to ask the machine to predict what is in the hidden part", explains the expert, who indicates that the process "works very well for the text ".

This method would allow the machine to "anticipate" a situation by reconstituting it in the manner of an animal or human brain that knows that an object hidden in its field of vision does not disappear and continues to exist. The ultimate goal would be to improve the overall perception of machines and "To train robots to learn to catch objects or to move without bumping, for example", illustrates Yann LeCun, before mentioning fields of application such as transport or medicine.

It will however be necessary to wait a little before being able to converse with a true C-3PO of Star Wars (that Yann LeCun considers much more realistic than a robot with the "Terminator"). "If you want to get an idea of ​​a possible scenario, that would be the movie" Her "that describes a kind of love story between the hero and a virtual intelligent agent called Samanthahe imagines. This kind of interaction with intelligent conversational agents that we have in our everyday life, which are like human but virtual assistants, is a possible future, " he continues, before nuance: "But it's not for tomorrow! "

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