Fei-Fei Li
Fei-Fei Li
Originally from Chengdu, China, Fei-Fei Li is a leading contributor to modern AI research. Best known for being the lead scientist behind the computer vision project ImageNet, Li's work has helped train much of the image recognition technology we use today -- from facial recognition models that identify faces in social media posts and surveillance footage, to sensors that recognize stop signs and pedestrians in self-driving vehicles.
Li started work on ImageNet to "map out the entire world of objects," as she told Quartz in 2017. She published the first version of ImageNet in 2009, the same year she became a professor at Stanford.
Since then, she founded AI4ALL, a nonprofit that focuses on increasing diversity, and took a sabbatical to join Google, where she was Google Cloud AI's chief scientist. In the Fall of 2018 she returned to Stanford, but remained an Advisor at Google.