Fei-Fei Li facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Fei-Fei Li
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| 李飞飞 | |
Li at AI for Good in 2017
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| Born | July 3, 1976 |
| Nationality | American |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Electrical engineering |
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| Thesis | Visual recognition: computational models and human psychophysics (2005) |
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Fei-Fei Li (born July 3, 1976) is a Chinese-American computer scientist. She is famous for her important work in artificial intelligence (AI). She is especially known for her contributions to computer vision, which teaches computers to "see" and understand images.
One of her biggest achievements is creating ImageNet. This is a huge collection of images that helped AI systems learn much faster. She is a professor at Stanford University and helps lead the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. She also co-founded AI4ALL, a group that helps more people get involved in AI.
In 2023, Time 100 magazine named her one of the most influential people in AI. She also received the Intel Lifetime Achievements Innovation Award. In 2020 and 2021, she was chosen to be a member of several important national academies. In 2023, she joined the United Nations Scientific Advisory Board.
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Early Life and Education
Fei-Fei Li was born in Beijing, China, in 1976. She grew up in Chengdu, Sichuan. When she was 12, her father moved to Parsippany, New Jersey, in the United States. Four years later, when she was 16, Li and her mother joined him.
While attending Parsippany High School, Li worked on weekends. She helped out at her family's dry-cleaning shop. She graduated from high school in 1995. Later, in 2017, she was honored in her high school's hall of fame.
Li then went to Princeton University. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics in 1999. During her time at Princeton, she often went home to help with the family business. She also worked as a dishwasher to help her family.
After Princeton, Li continued her studies at the California Institute of Technology. She earned her Master of Science degree in 2001. She then received her Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in electrical engineering in 2005. Her studies were supported by special fellowships.
Career and Research
After finishing her PhD, Li became a professor. She taught at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Princeton University. In 2009, she joined Stanford University. She became a full professor there in 2018. From 2013 to 2018, she led the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL).
Li's research focuses on how computers can "see" and understand the world. She also studies how our brains work. She has written over 300 research papers. She is a co-director of Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute. This institute aims to make AI better for people.
ImageNet: Teaching Computers to See
In 2007, while at Princeton, Li started a huge project called ImageNet. Her goal was to create a very large database of images. This database would help computers learn to recognize objects. She was inspired by the idea that humans can recognize about 30,000 different types of objects.
Many people thought her idea was too big. But Li kept working on it. She used an online service called Amazon Mechanical Turk. With this, she had people label over 14 million images. These images were sorted into 22,000 different categories.
From 2010 to 2017, Li and her team organized a competition. It was called the ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC). This competition used the ImageNet database. It pushed researchers to create better AI models for image recognition. ImageNet helped lead to big breakthroughs in deep learning.
Today, ImageNet is seen as a key invention. It has helped develop technologies like self-driving cars. It also improved facial recognition and medical imaging.
Work at Google Cloud
From 2017 to 2018, Li took a break from Stanford. She joined Google Cloud as its Chief Scientist of AI/ML. Her team worked on making AI technology easier for businesses to use. They developed products like AutoML.
Li believes that AI should be used to help people in good ways. She has said that it goes against her beliefs to work on any project that would use AI as a weapon. In 2018, she returned to Stanford University.
AI for Good: AI4ALL
Li is also known for her non-profit work. She is the co-founder and chairperson of AI4ALL. This group aims to teach the next generation of AI leaders. It promotes diversity and inclusion in the field of AI. The program was created with Melinda French Gates and Jensen Huang.
Before AI4ALL, Li and her former student, Olga Russakovsky, started a similar program. It was called SAILORS (Stanford AI Lab OutReach Summers). This was a summer camp for high school girls. It taught them about AI education and research. In 2017, SAILORS became AI4ALL @Stanford.
By 2018, AI4ALL had expanded. It launched summer programs at other universities. These included Princeton University and Carnegie Mellon University.
Li has been called a "researcher bringing humanity to AI." She believes that AI's influence is growing. She also thinks it's important to have many different people working in the field. This helps ensure AI benefits everyone.
New Ventures and Future of AI
In 2024, Li helped start a company called World Labs. This company focuses on "spatial intelligence" AI. This type of AI helps systems understand the three-dimensional world. It aims to let robots perform tasks based on spoken instructions. Li wants this technology to lead to more human-like AI reasoning.
Li has also spoken about the need for more public funding for AI research. She believes this is important for scientific uses of AI. It also helps in studying the risks of AI.
Teaching
Li teaches popular courses at Stanford. One is CS231n, which is about "Deep Learning for Computer Vision." She also taught CS131, an introductory class on computer vision.
Board Roles
In May 2020, Li joined the board of directors for Twitter. She served as an independent director. However, in October 2022, after Elon Musk bought the company, she and other directors were removed.
In August 2023, Li was appointed to the United Nations Scientific Advisory Board. This board gives advice on new trends in science, technology, and ethics. It helps bring scientific ideas into UN decisions.
Honors and Awards
Fei-Fei Li has received many awards for her work.
- 1999 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans
- 2011 Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship
- 2015 One of the Leading Global Thinkers, Foreign Policy
- 2016 J.K. Aggarwal Prize, International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR)
- 2018 Elected as ACM Fellow
- 2018 "America's Top 50 Women In Tech" by Forbes
- 2019 One of the BBC's 100 women
- 2020 Elected member of the National Academy of Engineering
- 2020 Elected member of the National Academy of Medicine
- 2021 Elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- 2023 Intel Lifetime Achievements Innovation Award
- 2023 Time AI100
- 2024 VinFuture Prize's grand prize
- 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering
Personal Life
Fei-Fei Li is married to Silvio Savarese, who is also a professor at Stanford. They have a son and a daughter.
See also
In Spanish: Fei-fei Li para niños
