In 1988, Yann LeCun joined the Adaptive Systems Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, United States, headed by Lawrence D. Jackel, where he developed a number of new machine learning methods, such as a biologically inspired model of image recognition called Convolutional Neural Networks, the “Optimal Brain Damage” regularization methods, and the Graph Transformer Networks method, which he applied 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. Today LeCun is director of Facebook AI Research in New York City.
(edited from Wikipedia)
More demos on LeCun’s website.
LATE IN 1967 a book was published in England which is as charming as it must be fascinating to all who are interested in the theory and practice of interpretation. Its principal author is the Dutch naturalist and ethologist Niko Tinbergen, who combined with a friend and artist to photograph the tracks left in the sand of the dunes by a variety of creatures and to reconstruct the stories they reveal in word and in image. The illustration I selected (Figure 1) shows the tracks of an oyster catcher peacefully walking along over the dunes till something apparently alarmed it, the walk turned into a hop, leaving deeper imprints in the sand, and it took off on its wings. This is not all the naturalists could infer from the configuration of the sand. They know that a bird cannot take off except precisely against the wind. At the time of the event, therefore, the wind must have blown from the left of the picture. But if you observe the ripples of the sand, they were formed by a wind coming from the direction of the camera. Accordingly, the tracks correctly interpreted reveal another story of the past: there was a change of wind between the formation of the ripples and that of the footprints. Not all of the picture illustrated is a photograph. What the artist has done is to superimpose on it his reconstruction of the oyster catcher taking off. This is how it appears to his mind’s eye and how, he is sure, it would have looked to the camera if one had been present at the moment.
Both questioned document examination and computer forensics belong to a branch of forensic science known as “trace evidence,” which owes its existence to the work of the French investigator Edmond Locard. Locard’s famous Exchange Principle may be glossed as follows: “a cross-transfer of evidence takes place whenever a criminal comes into contact with a victim, an object, or a crime scene.” Locard, a professed admirer of Arthur Conan Doyle who worked out of a police laboratory in Lyons until his death in 1966, pioneered the study of hair, fibers, soil, glass, paint, and other small things forgotten, primarily through microscopic means. His life’s work is the cornerstone of the stark dictum underlying contemporary forensic science: “Every contact leaves a trace.” This is more, not less, true in the delicate reaches of computer systems. Much hacker and cracker lore is given over to the problem of covering one’s “footsteps” when operating on a system uninvited; conversely, computer security often involves uncovering traces of suspicious activity inadvertently left behind in logs and system records.
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