Biography

Léon was born in 1965 in Saint Germain du Teil, Lozère near the Aubrac plateau. He spent his childhood in La Canourgue and attended school in Rodez and Clermont-Ferrand, then in École Sainte Geneviève, Versailles. He received the Diplôme d’Ingénieur de l'École Polytechnique (X84) in 1987, the Magistère de Mathématiques Fondamentales et Appliquées et d’Informatique from École Normale Superieure in 1988, the Diplôme d’Études Approndies in Computer Science in 1988, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from LRI, Université de Paris-Sud in 1991.

After his Ph.D., Léon joined AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1991 to 1992 and AT&T Labs from 1995 to 2002. Between 1992 and 1995 he was chairman of Neuristique, a small company pioneering machine learning for data mining applications. He has been with NEC Labs America in Princeton since 2002.

Léon’s primary research interest is machine learning. His contributions to this field address theory, algorithms and large scale applications. Léon’s secondary research interest is data compression and coding. His best known contribution in this field is the DjVu document compression technology. Léon has published over 60 papers. He is serving or has served on the boards of the Journal of Machine Learning Research, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine and Pattern Recognition Letters. He also serves on the scientific advisory board of Kxen Inc..