Fei-Fei Li

Fei-Fei Li is an American computer scientist at Stanford University, holding the position of Sequoia Professor and co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute. Li invented ImageNet and the ImageNet Challenge, a large-scale dataset and benchmarking effort contributing to significant developments in deep learning and artificial intelligence (AI), laying the foundations for modern image-recognition AI systems. Li's research interests include cognitively inspired AI, machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, robotic learning, and AI+ healthcare. Previously, she worked in cognitive and computational neuroscience. Li has published more than 300 scientific articles in journals and conferences in science, engineering, and computer science. She is the cofounder and chairperson of the national non-profit AI4ALL, aimed at increasing inclusion and diversity in AI education. She has served as a board member or advisor in various public or private companies.

Li was born in Chengdu, China, in 1976. When she was twelve, Li's father emigrated to Parsippany, New Jersey. Li and her mother joined her father in the US when she was fifteen. In 1995, Li earned a scholarship to study at Princeton. She majored in physics while also studying computer science and engineering. Li graduated from Princeton in 1999 with a BA degree in physics. In 2000, she began a PhD in electrical engineering at Caltech in Pasadena, working at the intersection of neuroscience and computer science. She completed PhD in 2005, submitting a thesis titled "Visual Recognition: Computational Models and Human Psychophysics," working with advisors Pietro Perona and Christof Koch. Li also holds an honorary doctorate degree from Harvey Mudd College, awarded in 2022.

Aside from a sabbatical between January 2018 and September 2018, when Li was Vice President at Google and Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud, Li has spent her career in academia. After completing her PhD, Li held assistant professor positions at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Princeton University before joining Stanford in June 2009. She was the director of Stanford’s AI Lab from 2013 to 2018. As of 2023, she is the inaugural Sequoia Professor and co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute.

Li began working on ImageNet in 2006, developing a database of images accompanied by text descriptions of their contents. By 2009, Li and her team, with the help of crowdsourced workers, had 3.2 million images labeled. In 2010, they hosted a competition to see who could design an AI system that most accurately determined the contents of the images.

Li has worked with policymakers nationally and locally to ensure the responsible use of technologies. This includes a number of U.S. Senate and Congressional testimonies, serving as a special advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations, a member of the California Future of Work Commission for the Governor of California in 2019–2020, and a member of the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Task Force (NAIRR) for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2021–2022. In 2023, Li authored the book The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration and Discovery at the Dawn of AI.

Honors and awards Li has received include the following:

• Woodrow Wilson Award, Princeton University (2024)
• Intel Lifetime Achievements Innovation Award, Intel (2023)
• Time AI 100, Time Magazine (2023)
• Thomas S. Huang Memorial Prize, IEEE PAMI (2022)
• Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) (2021)
• All Honors & Awards (32)
• Boards, Advisory Committees, Professional Organizations
• Special Advisor to Secretary General, United Nations (2023 - Present)
• Member, National AI Research Resource Task Force, White House OSTP and NSF (2021 - 2023)
• Co-Founder/Chairperson of the Board, AI4ALL (non-profit organization for inclusive AI education) (2015 - Present)
• Fellow, ACM (2014 - Present)
• Board of Directors, Computer Vision Foundation (non-profit organization supporting computer vision research) (2019 - Present)
• Senior Member, IEEE (2003 - Present)