“I believe in the future of AI changing the world. The question is: Who is changing AI? It is really important to bring diverse groups of students and future leaders into the development of AI.”

Fei-Fei Li was born in Beijing, China in 1976 and immigrated to Parsippany, NJ in 1991. She attended Princeton and earned a B.A. in Physics along with certificates in applied mathematics and engineering physics in 1999. In 2005, Li graduated with a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from CalTech where she studied computer vision. Li became a professor at UIUC from ‘05-’06, at Princeton from ‘07-’09, and finally, a professor at Stanford in 2009 where she currently serves as the director of Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. Throughout her career, Li created ImageNet which has become a baseline dataset for the AI image recognition community. She also cofounded AI4ALL to improve representation in the AI community. She has published over 300 papers and has been awarded numerous awards. She has also been elected to membership in National Academy of Engineering and American Academy of Arts and Sciences.