Fei-Fei Li’s biography, net worth, fact, career, awards and life story

Intro American computer scientist
Is Computer scientist 
Academic 
Professor 
Educator 
From United States of America 
Type Academia 
Education 
Science 
Technology 
Gender female
Birth 1975, Beijing, People’s Republic of China
Age: 45 years
Education
California Institute of Technology Doctor of Philosophy 2001-2005
Princeton University bachelor’s degree 1995-1999
California Institute of Technology 2001
Awards
J. K. Aggarwal Prize 2016
ACM Fellow  
BBC 100 Women 2019
Thousand Talents Program  

Fei-Fei Li (simplified Chinese: 李飞飞; traditional Chinese: 李飛飛; born 1976) is a Chinese-born American computer scientist, non-profit executive, and writer. She is the Sequoia Capital Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. 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. She served as the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) from 2013 to 2018. 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 (AI), machine learning, deep learning, computer vision and cognitive neuroscience. She was the leading scientist and principal investigator of ImageNet.

Early life and education

Li was born in Beijing, China in 1976 and grew up in Chengdu. When she was 12, her father moved to the US; when she was 16, she and her mother joined him in Parsippany-Troy Hills, New Jersey. She graduated from Parsippany High School in 1995, where she was inducted to the Hall of Fame of Parsippany High School in 2017.

Li majored in physics but also studied computed science and engineering as an undergraduate student at Princeton University, from where she graduated with high honors with an A.B. 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 Ph.D. 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.

Career

From 2005 to August 2009, Li was an assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Computer Science Department at Princeton University, respectively. She joined Stanford in 2009 as an assistant professor, and was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2012, and then full professor in 2017. 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.

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 focuses on democratizing AI technology and lowering the barrier for entrance to businesses and developers, including the developments of products like AutoML. She returned to Stanford University to continue her professorship in the fall of 2018.

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. 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). 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 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.

Li has been described as an “AI pioneer” and a “researcher bringing humanity to AI”.

Li was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2020.

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

Research

Li works on AI, machine learning, computer vision, cognitive neuroscience and computational neuroscience. She has published nearly 180 peer-reviewed research papers. Her work appears in computer science and neuroscience journals including Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Neuroscience, Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, International Conference on Computer Vision, Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, European Conference on Computer Vision, International Journal of Computer Vision, and IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. Among her best-known work is the ImageNet project, which has revolutionized the field of large-scale visual recognition.

Li has led the team of students and collaborators to organize the international competition on ImageNet recognition tasks called ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) between 2010 and 2017 in the academic community.

Li’s research in computer vision contributed significantly to a line of work called Natural Scene Understanding, or later, Story-telling of images. She is a recognized for her work in this area by the International Association for Pattern Recognition in 2016. She delivered a talk on the main stage of TED in Vancouver in 2015, and has since then been viewed more than 2 million times.

In recent years, Fei-Fei Li’s research work expanded to AI and Healthcare, collaborating closely with Prof. Arnold Milstein at Stanford, a recognized national leader working in improving healthcare delivery.

Teaching

She has taught the Stanford course CS231n on “Convolutional Neural Nets for Visual Recognition.” It is also on Coursera, a popular online learning platform founded by her Stanford colleagues Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng.

Selected honors and distinctions

  • 1999 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans
  • 2006 Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship
  • 2009 NSF CAREER Award
  • 2010 Best Paper Honorable Mention, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
  • 2011 Fellow, Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship
  • 2015 One of the Leading Global Thinkers of 2015, Foreign Policy
  • 2016 IEEE PAMI Mark Everingham Prize [reference link]
  • 2016 J.K. Aggarwal Prize, International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR)
  • 2016 One of the 40 “The great immigrants,” Carnegie Foundation
  • 2017 [email protected] Athena Award for Academic Leadership, University of California
  • 2017 One of Seven Women in Technology honorees, Elle Magazine
  • 2018 Elected as ACM Fellow for “contributions in building large knowledge bases for machine learning and visual understanding”
  • 2018 “America’s Top 50 Women In Tech” by Forbes
  • 2018 U.S. Congressional hearing by Subcommittee on Research and Technology & Subcommittee on Energy
  • 2019 Technical Leadership Abie Award Winner, AnitaB.org

Books

Li contributed one chapter to Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building it (2018) by the American futurist Martin Ford.

You May Also Like

Lil Wayne’s net worth, biography, fact, career, awards and life story

Lil Wayne net worth: Lil Wayne is an American rapper, producer and music executive who has a net worth of $150 million. The artist has accumulated many names over his career, including Birdman Jr., Young Tune, Dr. Carter, Weezyana, Tunechi, and countless others. No matter what you call him, one thing’s clear: the man’s been incredibly successful. He has sold over 100 million records worldwide, won numerous awards, and even surpassed Elvis Presley for having the most entries on the Billboard Top 100. His position as one of the best-selling musical artists in history gave him the experience he needed to start his own music label, Young Money Entertainment. Early Life: Lil Wayne was born Dwayne Michael Carter Jr. in 1982. Growing up in the low-income neighborhood of Hollygrove in New Orleans was not enough to stop Carter’s talents from being noticed early on. In Elementary school, the boy was put in the gifted program of his elementary school, and he also joined the drama club. By age eight, Carter had written his first rap song, and a year later he drew the attention of Bryan Williams – better known simply as “Birdman.” As the owner of Cash Money Records, Williams was Lil Wayne’s first chance at making it big. Carter left messages on Birdman’s answering machine that included his freestyles, and it convinced Williams to give the boy a shot. After appearing in a number of songs under the Cash Money Label, it was clear that music would be Lil Wayne’s future career focus. Tragedy struck when Carter was 12. He shot himself in the chest with a 9mm pistol and was driven to the hospital for a life-threatening wound by an off-duty officer. He has since admitted this was a suicide attempt and a result of his mother’s disapproval of his rapping career. Initial Success: Lil Wayne’s career truly began when he joined the group Hot Boys in 1997. The group experienced considerable success, reaching top spots on the R&B/Hip-Hop Billboard multiple times. By the time he was just 17 years old, Lil Wayne was ready to pursue a solo career with the release of his debut album, “Tha Block is Hot” in 1999. While his debut album certainly put him on the map, his next two albums (Lights Out and 500 Degreez) failed to capitalize on this early success – leaving him in danger of falling under the radar. Mainstream Success: That all changed in 2004 with the release of “Tha Carter.” Taking into account the follow-up album a year later (“Tha Carter II”), this period in Lil Wayne’s career represented a major step forward. His lyrics were more nuanced and mature, and his image began to take shape as he grew his trademark dreadlocks. The hit single “Fireman” was an especially high point at this stage. The next two years represented a relatively unproductive period for the rapper, although he did feature on numerous tracks by other artists, including Fat Joe, Wyclef Jean, and Ludacris. Lil Wayne returned with a vengeance in 2008, releasing “Tha Carter III. One of Lil Wayne’s most successful songs of all time, “Lollipop,” was on this album. Lil Wayne’s next major milestone came with the release of “Tha Carter IV” in 2011. After another long wait, “Tha Carter V” was released in 2018 with similar levels of success. In numerous interviews, the rapper has stated that “Tha Carter V” was his last album. He has expressed a desire to retire and focus more on his family. Personal Life: Lil Wayne has four children, the first of whom was born in 1998 when Carter was 16. Although Lil Wayne married the child’s mother, Toya Johnson, they divorced in 2006. In 2008, the rapper welcomed his first son into the world alongside the boy’s mother, a radio broadcaster. He named his son Dwayne III. In 2009, he had another child with actress Lauren London. Another son was born in 2009, this time to the singer Nivea. Substance Abuse and Health Issues: Carter allegedly abused the powerful substance known as “Lean” for a number of years. This supposed addiction has been attributed to a string of health scares for the rapper, including seizures for which hospitalization was necessary. One of the most serious of these incidents occurred in 2017 when Lil Wayne had to be hospitalized after two seizures in quick succession. Despite the allegations, Lil Wayne has repeatedly denied any connection between an alleged substance problem and the seizures. In 2013, Carter stated that he suffers from epilepsy. Controversy: Lil Wayne has been arrested multiple times. In 2007 the rapper was arrested for possession of marijuana and criminal possession of a weapon. In 2008, he was arrested once again; this time on more serious charges. Carter was caught by Border Patrol in Arizona, and his tour bus was found to contain weapons and a variety of illegal drugs in large quantities. He was charged with possession of narcotic drugs for sale among other felonies. 2010 saw Lil Wayne serving a one-year sentence for weapons charges in Rikers Island, and he later served 36 months of probation as part of a plea deal. In the end, he only served 8 months of the year-long sentence. In addition, Lil Wayne has been the subject of a number of legal actions within the music industry. He has been accused of copyright infringement due to a number of issues with his songs. In other cases, Lil Wayne has failed to pay royalties to record labels and has canceled appearances for which he had already been paid to perform. Lil Wayne has also participated in a number of well-publicized feuds. The rapper has clashed with people such as Juvenile, Young Buck, Pusha T, and Jay-Z. Lil Wayne Earnings By Year: 2007: $12 million 2008: $13 million 2009: $18 million 2010: $20 million 2011: $15 million 2012: $27 million 2013: $16 million 2014: $23 million 2015: $15 million 2016: $14 million 2017: $16 million 2018: $19 million Total: $208 million Real Estate: In 2011, Wayne spent $11.6 million on a waterfront home on an island in Miami. He proceeded to sink millions of dollars into the property. He listed the home for sale for $18 million in 2015, then ultimately dropped the price to $12 million before accepting $10 million in June 2017. In December 2018, Wayne dropped $17 million on a new island home in Miami.
Read More