Fei-Fei Li

Published by Daniel at October 1, 2023

Champion of artificial intelligence's positive power and one of the top minds in this area, Fei-Fei Li is determined to prove how AI can enhance people's lives and open doors for diversity...

Fei-Fei Li is a Chinese-American computer scientist, writer, and professor born in Beijing in 1976. She is considered one of the most prolific scientists in AI and deep learning and has occupied prominent positions in some of the top AI laboratories worldwide, including Google Cloud and Stanford University AI Lab. Li grew up in Chengdu – China, and moved to the U.S. to finish her High School at Parsippany High School in New Jersey in 1995. After attending school, she earned a scholarship to pursue her undergraduate degree in physics from Princeton, graduating with High Honors in 1999. During these years, she was drawn to study computer science and engineering. The following year, she attended Caltech for her Ph.D. in electrical engineering, graduating in 2005. .(1,2) During her time at Caltech, Dr. Li showed enthusiasm for computational neuroscience and machine learning, choosing this topic as the theme of her doctoral thesis titled “Visual Recognition: Computational Models and Human Psychophysics.”.(3)

The benefits of a career in academics

After graduating from Caltech, Fei-Fei Li decided to follow a career in academics and joined the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign staff as an Assistant Professor of computer engineering in 2005 and a full-time faculty member in the AI group at the Beckman Institute. In 2007, she returned to Princeton University to be part of this institution’s faculty.(4)

A shared vision

A few years later, in 2009, Dr. Li started a defining point in her professional life when she began serving as an Associate Professor at Stanford University. She thrived in the computer science department at this institution, being promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in the next two years. She soon became the Director of one of the most advanced AI labs worldwide, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL), working with more than 100 students and publishing several articles from 2013 to 2018. (1,2,5)

During her sabbatical year at Stanford in 2017, Dr. Li took the vice president’s seat at Google and oversaw deep learning research as Chief Scientist of the AI lab at Google Cloud. At Google, she focused on democratizing AI technology and optimizing conditions for businesses and developers, creating products like Cloud AutoML, an automated machine learning model.(1,2,5)

Building neural networks

While Fei-Fei Li’s career has expanded into several pathways, her interest in computer vision, machine learning, and computational neuroscience remained. In 2019, Li discussed AI’s transformative potential for society, disclosing that its development must be augmented by human intelligence. Her research in computer vision contributed significantly to a line of work called Natural Scene Understanding. Li invented ImageNet, the most prominent visual database globally, and with it, she transformed our understanding of convolutional neural networks and image recognition.(6,7)

The project contains 15 million precise photographs organized into 22,000 categories. The creation of ImageNet is considered a turning point at the beginning of the deep learning revolution and gave Li a position as a leading national voice in AI.(6,7)

Her research in computer vision contributed significantly to a line of work called Natural Scene Understanding. Li invented ImageNet, the most prominent visual database globally, and with it, she transformed our understanding of convolutional neural networks and image recognition.The project contains 15 million precise photographs organized into 22,000 categories. The creation of ImageNet is considered a turning point at the beginning of the deep learning revolution and gave Li a position as a leading national voice in AI.(6,7)

There is nothing artificial in AI

Li has always committed to boosting diversity and inclusion in science and education throughout her life. She co-founded the Stanford AI Lab Outreach Summer Program (SAILORS), an annual two-week summer camp that teaches high school girls to learn about AI. The program evolved into the nonprofit AI4ALL in early 2017, whose mission is to increase AI education diversity through human-centered AI principles. In 2018, AI4ALL successfully spread to five more campuses in addition to Stanford, including Princeton University, Carnegie Mellon University, Boston University, U. of California Berkeley, and Canada’s Simon Fraser University. She has also taught the Stanford course CS231n on Convolutional Neural Nets for Visual Recognition, which is a 10-week course and teaches the participants to train their own neural networks, receiving a detailed understanding of computer vision (image classification) and natural language processing (text classification and generation). This dedication to education and to showing AI’s positive power has gained Li the title of “researcher bringing humanity to AI.”(6,8)

A flourishing relationship

This acclaimed scientist has authored over 200 scientific articles in top-tier journals and conferences, including Nature, PNAS, Journal of Neuroscience, CVPR, ICCV, IEEE-PAMI, New England Journal of Medicine, and Nature Digital Medicine. In recent years, her research expanded to the benefits of AI in healthcare evolution, collaborating closely with Prof. Arnold Milstein at Stanford, a recognized national leader working to improve healthcare delivery, especially in radiology and cardiology. She is the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. (9)

Visualizing success

Li has received many awards, including the ACM Fellow for “contributions in building large knowledge bases for machine learning and visual understanding” and “America’s Top 50 Women In Tech” by Forbes in 2018, and in 2019, the recipient of the National Geographic Further Award.(7)