Fei-Fei Li

Dr. Fei-Fei Li is the inaugural Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute (HAI). She is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of artificial intelligence, primarily for creating ImageNet — the massive visual database and annual competition that catalyzed the deep learning revolution.

ImageNet, which Li conceived in 2006 and launched in 2009, contained over 14 million hand-labeled images across 20,000 categories. The 2012 ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) saw the breakthrough victory of AlexNet — a deep convolutional neural network that dramatically outperformed all traditional methods — marking the beginning of the modern deep learning era.

Born in Beijing and raised in Parsippany, New Jersey, Li immigrated to the United States at age 15 with her family. She worked multiple jobs while attending Princeton University on a scholarship, earning a BA in Physics. She completed her PhD in Electrical Engineering at Caltech.

Li served as VP at Google and Chief Scientist at Google Cloud. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2024, she published her memoir 'The Worlds I See,' which traces her journey from immigrant teenager to AI pioneer.