====== Biography ======

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Léon was born in 1965 in Saint Germain du Teil, [[wp>Lozère]] 
near the [[http://www.aubrac.com|Aubrac]] plateau.
He spent his childhood in [[http://www.la-canourgue.com|La Canourgue]]
and attended school in [[wp>Rodez]] and [[wp>Clermont-Ferrand]],
then in [[http://www.bginette.com|École Sainte Geneviève]], [[wp>Versailles]].
He received the Diplôme d'Ingénieur de [[http://www.polytechnique.fr|l'École Polytechnique]] 
([[https://www.polytechnique.org/profile/leon.bottou.1984|X84]]) in 1987, 
the Magistère de Mathématiques Fondamentales et Appliquées et d'Informatique from
[[http://www.ens.fr|École Normale Superieure]] in 1988, the Diplôme d'Études Approndies 
in Computer Science in 1988, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from [[http://www.lri.fr|LRI]], 
[[http://www.u-psud.fr|Université de Paris-Sud]] in 1991.

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After his Ph.D., Léon went to [[wp>Bell_Labs|AT&T Bell Laboratories]] from 1991 to 1992.
He then became chairman of [[:projects:neuristique|Neuristique]], 
a small company pioneering machine learning for data mining applications.
He returned to [[http://www.research.att.com|AT&T Labs]] from 1995 to 2002,
[[http://www.nec-labs.com|NEC Labs America]] 
at [[wp>Princeton,_New_Jersey|Princeton]] from 2002 to 2010,
and [[http://research.microsoft.com/|Microsoft]] from 2010 to February 2015.
He joined the [[http://research.facebook.com/ai|Facebook AI Research]] in March 2015.

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Léon's primary [[research]] interest is machine learning. 
His contributions to this field address theory, algorithms and large scale applications. 
His best known contributions are his work on [[:research:stochastic|stochastic gradient learning algorithms]], on [[:research:largescale|large scale learning]], 
and on the [[:research:djvu|DjVu document compression technology]].
Léon has published about one hundred twenty scientific [[papers]]. 
He is serving or has served on the editorial boards of 
the [[http://www.jmlr.org|Journal of Machine Learning Research]],
[[http://www.computer.org/tpami|IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine]]
and [[http://ees.elsevier.com/patrec|Pattern Recognition Letters]],
and on the executive board of the [[https://neurips.cc/Conferences/2014/Board|NeurIPS foundation]].
He won the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blavatnik_Awards_for_Young_Scientists|2007]]
[[http://blavatnikawards.org/|Blavatnik Award for young scientists]] and the [[https://www.mathopt.org/?nav=lagrange_20212021|Lagrange Prize in Continuous Optimization]].