William Falcon

Career

Falcon's GitHub profile describes Falcon as the creator of PyTorch Lightning and CEO of Lightning AI, and as an AI PhD researcher at NYU. The same profile lists earlier work at Facebook AI Research, Goldman Sachs and Columbia, and a co-founding role at NextGenVest.¹

Open-source work

The PyTorch Lightning citation file gives a release date of 2019-03-30 and lists Falcon and "The PyTorch Lightning team" as authors. The framework organizes PyTorch code so that training infrastructure such as mixed precision and multi-GPU or multi-node training is handled by the library, and it is published under the Apache 2.0 license.²⁴⁵

Falcon published the 1.0.0 "General availability" release of PyTorch Lightning in October 2020, and the repository's CODEOWNERS file lists Falcon, together with Luca Antiga, as an owner of the README and documentation index files.³⁶

Research

With Kyunghyun Cho, Falcon wrote a 2020 paper that describes contrastive self-supervised learning methods within a single conceptual framework and uses it to design a new approach.⁷

Work and contributions

• PyTorch Lightning Open-source code

  Creator of the framework and the named author in its citation file; Falcon also published the 1.0.0 general availability release in October 2020 and is a code owner for its documentation and README.²¹³⁶

• A Framework For Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning And Designing A New Approach Published research

  First author, with Kyunghyun Cho, of a 2020 paper that sets out a conceptual framework for contrastive self-supervised learning and proposes a new approach within it.⁷

Timeline

1. Mar 30, 2019PyTorch Lightning's citation file records a release date of 2019-03-30, with Falcon as named author.²
2. Aug 2020Posted a paper on a framework for contrastive self-supervised learning with Kyunghyun Cho.⁷
3. Oct 13, 2020Published the PyTorch Lightning 1.0.0 general availability release.³

Other documented roles

Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.

• Past affiliation (listed as former on Falcon's GitHub profile), Facebook AI Research¹

Where they work

• Lightning AI 3 people in the wiki

Related people

• Luca AntigaAlso at Lightning AI
• Sebastian RaschkaAlso at Lightning AI
• Lukas BiewaldDeveloper tools · Training systems
• Adam PaszkeML frameworks and libraries · Training systems
• Chip HuyenDeveloper tools · ML frameworks and libraries
• Matei ZahariaTraining systems · Developer tools
• Sam GrossML frameworks and libraries · Developer tools
• Frédéric BastienML frameworks and libraries · Training systems
• Sylvain GuggerML frameworks and libraries · Training systems
• Piero MolinoML frameworks and libraries · Developer tools