New Jersey AI Pioneer Honored at Liberty Science Center’s 2026 Genius Gala

Imagine walking into a party where every person in the room is one of the smartest people you’ll ever meet. Meanwhile, an R2-D2 robot weaves through a crowd of hundreds dressed in black-tie attire, beeping playfully. This was the scene at a recent event at Jersey City's Liberty Science Center (LSC), which hosted innovators and philanthropists for its 14th annual Genius Gala. The soirée spotlighted Project Supernova, a $40-million, largely state-funded expansion to LSC's facilities aimed at cementing New Jersey as a premier destination for science and technology. The transformation will bring a physics-themed miniature golf course, a river otter habitat, a goat playground, expanded animal exhibits, and other major upgrades to the center's planetarium and traveling exhibition spaces. The evening’s Genius award honorees included de-extinction paleogenomicist Beth Shapiro, rare disease researcher and physician Dr. David Fajgenbaum, and early AI pioneer Yann LeCun, who lives in Rumson. LeCun, the son of an aerospace engineer, grew up in the Paris suburbs before moving to New Jersey. He spent the early days of his career working in artificial intelligence at the former AT&T Bell Labs facility in Holmdel—now Bell Works—where in the 1980s he and his colleagues helped pioneer convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that helped U.S. Postal Service systems read and sort handwritten ZIP codes. Formerly a chief AI scientist at Meta, LeCun is the founder of Paris-based AI startup Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs. Accepting his award, he offered a more reassuring view of AI. "It's not going to take your job—it's going to change your job," he said. "[...] It's going to transform society, but it's not going to create mass unemployment." LSC's Project Supernova is expected to be completed in 2028. The post New Jersey AI Pioneer Honored at Liberty Science Center’s 2026 Genius Gala appeared first on New Jersey Monthly .