Leon Bottou This is Me

Education

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1. 1. KXEN, the Data Mining Automation Company

   www.kxen.com/index.php?option= - [Cached]

   Published on: 6/22/2008   Last Visited: 6/22/2008

   Leon Bottou
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   Leon Bottou
   
   Leon Bottou received a Diplome from Ecole Polytechnique, Paris in 1987, a Magistere from Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris in 1988, and a PhD in Computer Science from Universite de Paris-Sud in 1991.Leon has fifteen years of experience in statistical learning algorithms of all kinds.He spent twelve months in Bell Labs where he met Vladimir Vapnik and made several contributions to Vapnik's statistical learning theory.Then he became chairman of Neuristique and pioneered data-mining techniques in the early nineties.Leon joined AT&T Labs-Research in 1996 where he invented the "graph transformer network" method that is now used by large NCR check reading machines processing about 10% of all the checks in the US.Leon then designed the DjVu document image compression system that allows anyone to put high-resolution scanned document in color on the web.

2. 2. Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists | The New York Academy of Sciences

   www.nyas.org/about/blavatnik_0 - [Cached]

   Published on: 11/27/2007   Last Visited: 11/27/2007

   Léon Bottou
   ...
   Léon Bottou
   ...
   There's a four-in-ten chance that a check you've written has been read by a piece of software that Léon Bottou wrote. While working at AT&T Bell Labs in the late 1990s, Bottou played a major role in the development of an image pattern recognition system that incorporated novel methods to enable simultaneous segmenting and recognition of images of strings of sloppily handwritten characters. Wachovia Bank became a customer.
   
   And it's likely you will benefit from another platform Bottou developed. His DjVu document compression method uses highly efficient algorithms to segment and compress bi-tonal and color images, photos, or text documents into foreground and background components. Freely available online, DjVu is being used by the Million Books Project to build a free online public library. For the past five years, Bottou has been a research scientist in the machine learning group at NEC Labs America. He describes the goal of his work there as simply, "to make computers smart."
   
   Bottou explains the advantage of a machine-learning approach: "In the beginning, people tried to make systems recognize characters based on a priori knowledge. But there was always another kind of [letter] 'A' that didn't fit the model." Instead, he says, an artificial neural network with a lot of parameters can let a computer recognize characters closer to the way a human brain does. "We input millions of little images of characters and output the identity of the character. Then we adjust the parameter programmatically until the thing recognizes them." Following on the success of such programming, Bottou says his career has been to answer questions such as, "What kind of task can you solve that way? How fast can you do it? and, How far can you extend these principles?"
   
   As most of his work to date has been in teaching computers to interpret images, Bottou says his next challenge is to teach them to understand language.

3. 3. KXEN Downloads

   www.kxen.co.uk/news/2004/08/is - [Cached]

   Published on: 1/1/2004   Last Visited: 3/31/2008

   Dr. Leon Bottou has over 15 years of experience in statistical learning algorithms and is currently senior research scientist at NEC Research Lab. He spent 12 months in Bell Labs where he met Vladimir Vapnik and contributed to his statistical learning theory. He pioneered data-mining techniques in the early 1990s and joined AT&T Labs-Research in 1996 where he invented the "graph transformer network" method that is now used by large NCR check reading machines processing about 10% of all the checks in the U.S. Dr Bottou then designed the DjVu document image compression system that allows anyone to put high-resolution scanned document in color on the web.