Fei-Fei Li

Fei-Fei Li (born 1976) is a China-born American computer scientist, known for establishing ImageNet, the dataset that enabled rapid advances in computer vision in the 2010s.

She is Sequoia Capital professor of computer science at Stanford University and former board director at Twitter.

Li is a co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and a co-director of the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab.

Li was born in Beijing, China in 1976 and grew up in Chengdu, Sichuan.

When she was 12, her father moved to the United States; when she was 15, she and her mother joined him in Parsippany–Troy Hills, New Jersey.

She graduated from Parsippany High School in 1995.

Li majored in physics but also studied computer science and engineering as an undergraduate student at Princeton University, from which she graduated with high honors with a Bachelor of Arts with a major in physics and certificates in applied and computational mathematics and engineering physics in 1999.

Li completed her senior thesis, titled "Auditory Binaural Correlogram Difference: A New Computational Model for Huggins Dichotic Pitch," under the supervision of Professor of Electrical Engineering Bradley Dickinson.

During her years at Princeton, she returned home most weekends so that she could work in her parents' dry-cleaning store.

Li then pursued graduate studies at the California Institute of Technology, where she received a Doctor of Philosophy in electrical engineering in 2005.

Li completed her dissertation, titled "Visual Recognition: Computational Models and Human Psychophysics," under the primary supervision of Pietro Perona and secondary supervision of Christof Koch.

Her graduate studies were supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans.

From 2005 to 2006, Li was an assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and from 2007 to 2009, she was an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Princeton University.

She joined Stanford in 2009 as an assistant professor, and was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2012, and then full professor in 2018.

She served as the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 2013 to 2018.

At Stanford, Li served as the director of Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL) from 2013 to 2018.

She became the founding co-director of Stanford's University-level initiative - the Human-Centered AI Institute, along with co-director Dr. John Etchemendy, former provost of Stanford University.

SAILORS was an annual summer camp at Stanford dedicated to 9th grade high school girls in AI education and research, established in 2015 till it changed its name to AI4ALL @Stanford in 2017.

In 2017, she co-founded AI4ALL, a nonprofit organization working to increase diversity and inclusion in the field of artificial intelligence.

Her research expertise includes artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, computer vision and cognitive neuroscience.

(She was inducted to the Hall of Fame of Parsippany High School in 2017.)

On her sabbatical from Stanford University from January 2017 to fall of 2018, Li joined Google Cloud as its Chief Scientist of AI/ML and Vice President.

At Google, her team focused on democratizing AI technology and lowering the barrier for entrance to businesses and developers, including the developments of products like AutoML.

In September 2017, Google secured a contract from the Department of Defense called Project Maven, which aimed to use AI techniques to interpret images captured by drone cameras.

Google told employees who protested the company's work on Project Maven that their role was "specifically scoped to be for non-offensive purposes."

Prior to establishing AI4ALL in 2017, Li and her former student Olga Russakovsky, currently an assistant professor in Princeton University, co-founded and co-directed the precursor program at Stanford called SAILORS (Stanford AI Lab OutReach Summers).

In June 2018, Google told employees it would not seek renewal of the contract.

In internal emails which were later leaked to reporters, Li expressed enthusiasm for the Google Cloud role in Project Maven, but warned against mentioning its AI component, saying that military AI is linked in the public mind with the danger of autonomous weapons.

Asked about those leaked emails, Li told The New York Times, "I believe in human-centered AI to benefit people in positive and benevolent ways. It is deeply against my principles to work on any project that I think is to weaponize AI."

In the fall of 2018, Li left Google and returned to Stanford University to continue her professorship.

Li is also known for her nonprofit work as the co-founder and chairperson of nonprofit organization AI4ALL, whose mission is to educate the next generation of AI technologists, thinkers and leaders by promoting diversity and inclusion through human-centered AI principles.

The program was created in collaboration with Melinda French Gates and Jensen Huang.

In 2018, AI4ALL has successfully launched five more summer programs in addition to Stanford, including Princeton University, Carnegie Mellon University, Boston University, U. of California Berkeley, and Canada's Simon Fraser University.

"We are at a turning point. AI’s influence continues to grow, but representation and inclusion of a diversity of researchers in the field does not. It’s critical that we seize this moment to create structures that will support long-term, positive changes. This won’t happen via a single mechanism or quick fix. It starts with early education and extends to the existing structures of power within academia, work cultures among current AI researchers, and gatekeeping functions of research publishing, to name a few levers of change."

Li has been described as a "researcher bringing humanity to AI."

Li was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021, the National Academy of Engineering in 2020, and the National Academy of Medicine in 2020.

Li was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2020, of the National Academy of Medicine in 2020, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.

In May 2020, Li joined the board of directors of Twitter as an independent director.

On October 27, 2022, following Elon Musk’s purchase of the company, he removed Li and eight others from Twitter's nine-member board of directors, leaving himself as the sole director.

Li works on artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, cognitive neuroscience, and computational neuroscience.