Fei Fei Li
Dr. Fei-Fei Li is the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University and Co-Director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute. She served as the Director of Stanford’s AI Lab from 2013 to 2018.
During her sabbatical from Stanford from January 2017 to September 2018, Dr. Li was Vice President atGoogleand served as Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud.
Dr. Li’s current research interests include cognitively inspired AI, machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, and AI in healthcare, particularly ambient intelligent systems for healthcare delivery. Her past research focused on cognitive and computational neuroscience.
She is the inventor ofImageNetand the ImageNet Challenge, a critical large-scale dataset and benchmarking effort that has significantly advanced deep learning and AI. Dr Li is a national leading voice for advocating diversity in STEM and AI and is co-founder and chairperson of the national non-profit AI4ALL, which aims to increase inclusion and diversity in AI education.
Dr. Li has published more than 200 scientific articles in top-tier journals and conferences, including Nature, PNAS, Journal of Neuroscience, CVPR, ICCV, NIPS, ECCV, ICRA, IROS, RSS, IJCV, IEEE-PAMI, New England Journal of Medicine, and Nature Digital Medicine.Her book, ‘The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI’, offers an engaging narrative of a scientist's journey and a clear explanation of the origins and nature of artificial intelligence.
Dr. Li is also aTED Speaker, delivering insights on spatial computing, AI, and related fields. She has worked extensively to contribute to the birth of modern AI, and is rightly called 'The Godmother of AI".
Dr. Li received her B.A. degree in physics from Princeton in 1999 with high honors, and her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2005. She joined Stanford in 2009 as an assistant professor. Before that, she was on the faculty at Princeton University (2007-2009) and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2005-2006). Dr. Fei-Fei Li, featured on Edelman’s 2025 “AI Creators You Need to Know” list, is a renowned computer scientist and AI expert.
Currently, Dr. Li isbuilding a startupthat uses human-like processing of visual data to enable artificial intelligence (AI) to perform advanced reasoning. She raised funds for the company in a recent seed funding round, with investors including Silicon Valley venture firmAndreessen Horowitzand Radical Ventures, a Canadian firm she joined as a scientific partner last year.
