Lê Viết Quốc (born 1982), or in

romanized In linguistics, romanization is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, and transcription, ...

form Quoc Viet Le, is a Vietnamese computer scientist and a machine learning pioneer at

Google Brain Google Brain was a deep learning artificial intelligence research team that served as the sole AI branch of Google before being incorporated under the newer umbrella of Google AI, a research division at Google dedicated to artificial intelligence ...

, which he established with colleagues from Google. He co-invented the

doc2vec DOC, Doc, doc or DoC may refer to: People and characters * Doc, an abbreviation of doctor * Doc (nickname) * Doc (mascot), the Towson University mascot Persons * The D.O.C., American rapper (born 1968) * Doc Gallows (born 1983), ring name of ...

and

seq2seq Seq2seq is a family of machine learning approaches used for natural language processing. Applications include language translation, image captioning, conversational models, speech recognition, and text summarization. Seq2seq uses sequence transfor ...

models in

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...

. Le also initiated and lead the

AutoML Automated machine learning (AutoML) is the process of automating the tasks of applying machine learning to real-world problems. It is the combination of automation and ML. AutoML potentially includes every stage from beginning with a raw datas ...

initiative at Google Brain, including the proposal of

neural architecture search Neural architecture search (NAS) is a technique for automating the design of artificial neural networks (ANN), a widely used model in the field of machine learning. NAS has been used to design networks that are on par with or outperform hand-desig ...

Education and career

Le was born in

Hương Thủy Hương Thủy is a district-level town (''thị xã'') of Huế in the North Central Coast region of Vietnam. As of 2020 the town had a population of 95,299. The town covers an area of 426.96 km². This district has five urban wards, ...

in the Thừa Thiên Huế province of Vietnam. He attended Quốc Học Huế High School before moving to Australia in 2004 to pursue a Bachelor’s degree at the

Australian National University The Australian National University (ANU) is a public university, public research university and member of the Group of Eight (Australian universities), Group of Eight, located in Canberra, the capital of Australia. Its main campus in Acton, A ...

. During his undergraduate studies, he worked wit
Alex Smola
on

Kernel method In machine learning, kernel machines are a class of algorithms for pattern analysis, whose best known member is the support-vector machine (SVM). These methods involve using linear classifiers to solve nonlinear problems. The general task of patt ...

in machine learning. In 2007, Le moved to the United States to pursue graduate studies in computer science at

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

, where his PhD advisor was

Andrew Ng Andrew Yan-Tak Ng (; born April 18, 1976) is a British-American computer scientist and Internet Entrepreneur, technology entrepreneur focusing on machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Ng was a cofounder and head of Google Brain and ...

. In 2011, Le became a founding member of Google Brain along with his then advisor

, Google Fellow

Jeff Dean Jeffrey Adgate Dean (born July 23, 1968) is an American computer scientist and software engineer. Since 2018, he has been the lead of Google AI. He was appointed Google's chief scientist in 2023 after the merger of DeepMind and Google Brain into ...

, and researcher Greg Corrado. He led

’s first major breakthrough: a deep learning algorithm trained on 16,000

CPU core A multi-core processor (MCP) is a microprocessor on a single integrated circuit (IC) with two or more separate central processing units (CPUs), called ''cores'' to emphasize their multiplicity (for example, ''dual-core'' or ''quad-core''). Ea ...

s, which learned to recognize cats by watching YouTube videos—without being explicitly taught the concept of a "cat." In 2014, Le co-proposed two influential models in machine learning. Together with

Ilya Sutskever Ilya Sutskever (; born 8 December 1986) is an Israeli-Canadian computer scientist who specializes in machine learning. He has made several major contributions to the field of deep learning. With Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, he co-inv ...

, Oriol Vinyals, he introduced the

model for

machine translation Machine translation is use of computational techniques to translate text or speech from one language to another, including the contextual, idiomatic and pragmatic nuances of both languages. Early approaches were mostly rule-based or statisti ...

, a foundational technique in natural language processing. In the same year, in collaboration with Tomáš Mikolov, Le developed the doc2vec model for

representation learning In machine learning (ML), feature learning or representation learning is a set of techniques that allow a system to automatically discover the representations needed for feature detection or classification from raw data. This replaces manual fea ...

of documents. Le was also a key contributor of Google Neural Machine Translation system. In 2017, Le initiated and led the

project at

, pioneering the use of

. This project significantly advanced automated machine learning. In 2020, Le contributed to the development of Meena, later renamed

LaMDA The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) is a drama school located in Hammersmith, London. Founded in 1861, it is the oldest specialist drama school in the British Isles and a founding member of the Federation of Drama Schools. In ...

, a conversational large language model based on the

architecture. In 2022, Le and coauthors published

chain-of-thought prompting Prompt engineering is the process of structuring or crafting an instruction in order to produce the best possible output from a generative artificial intelligence (AI) model. A ''prompt'' is natural language text describing the task that an AI s ...

, a method that enhances the reasoning capabilities of large language models.

Honors and awards

Le was named

MIT Technology Review ''MIT Technology Review'' is a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was founded in 1899 as ''The Technology Review'', and was re-launched without "''The''" in its name on April 23, 1998, under then pu ...

's innovators under 35 in 2014. He has been interviewed by and his research has been reported in major media outlets including

Wired Wired may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Music * ''Wired'' (Jeff Beck album), 1976 * ''Wired'' (Hugh Cornwell album), 1993 * ''Wired'' (Mallory Knox album), 2017 * "Wired", a song by Prism from their album '' Beat Street'' * "Wired ...

the New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...

the Atlantic ''The Atlantic'' is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher based in Washington, D.C. It features articles on politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science. It was founded in 185 ...

, and the

. Le was named an Alumni Laureate of the

School of Computing in 2022.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Le, Quoc V. 1982 births Australian National University alumni Stanford University alumni Google people Machine learning researchers Artificial intelligence researchers Vietnamese computer specialists American computer scientists People from Huế Living people

Education and career

Honors and awards

See also

References