AI Pioneer Yann LeCun Will Address the Class of 2026 at the NYU Tandon Commencement

The NYU Tandon School of Engineering has announced that Yann LeCun — recipient of the 2018 ACM Turing Award, inventor of the convolutional neural network, and one of the handful of researchers whose work truly defines the era the students are graduating into – will address the Class of 2026 at their commencement ceremony, scheduled for May 18 at the Barclays Center, in Brooklyn.

As the Jacob T. Schwartz Professor at NYU — with appointments at the Courant Institute School of Mathematics, Computing, and Data Science and Tandon’s own Electrical and Computer Engineering Department — he has been a well-known and respected figure here for more than two decades. He founded the NYU Center for Data Science, built Meta's AI research organization from the ground up during his tenure as Chief AI Scientist, and in January of this year became Executive Chairman of Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) Labs.

LeCun’s career is a masterclass in the kind of long-horizon, conviction-driven research Tandon hopes to cultivate in its students. He spent much of the 1990s and 2000s advancing neural networks through a period when the broader field had largely moved on, and the technologies he developed — in deep learning, computer vision, document recognition — are now foundational to entire industries. He is now blazing a similar trail at AMI, pioneering world models at a time when most are still focused on LLMs.  

His honors include the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, the VinFuture Grand Prize, the Princess of Asturias Award, the Légion d'Honneur, and membership in the U.S. National Academies of Sciences and Engineering as well as the French Académie des Sciences.

For more information, visit Tandon Commencement 2026 .