Dr. Yann LeCun is the OG deep learning pioneer. He's the one who brought the whole "neural networks" thing into the mainstream. Before he was a professor at Columbia, he was a researcher at Bell Labs. He's the real deal, folks.
Check out his work on Yann's research papers and learn from the masters.
Want to know more about the pioneers of deep learning? Check out Geoff Hinton for some real talk.