On August 3, 2023, it was announced that Li was appointed to the United Nations Scientific Advisory Board, established by Secretary-GeneralAntonio Guterres.[22][23] In 2024, Li made to the Gold House’s most impactful Asian A100 list.[24]
Li pursued her undergraduate studies at Princeton University. She received a Bachelor of Arts with a major in physics from Princeton University in 1999.[29] Li completed her senior thesis, titled "Auditory binaural correlogram difference: a new computational model for huggins dichotic pitch," under the supervision of Bradley Dickinson, professor of electrical engineering.[30] During her years at Princeton, she returned home most weekends to help run her family's dry cleaning business[5][31] and worked as a dishwasher to supplement the family income.[26]
From 2005 to 2006, Li was an assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and from 2007 to 2009, she was an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Princeton University. She joined Stanford in 2009 as an assistant professor, and was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2012, and then full professor in 2018.[33] 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.[34]
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.[35] At Google, her team focused on democratizing AI technology and lowering the barrier for entrance to businesses and developers,[36] including the developments of products like AutoML.[37][38]
In September 2017, Google secured a contract from the Department of Defense called Project Maven, which aimed to use AI techniques to interpret images captured by drone cameras.[39][40] Google told employees who protested the company's work on Project Maven that their role was "specifically scoped to be for non-offensive purposes."[41] In June 2018, Google told employees it would not seek renewal of the contract.[40] In internal emails which were later leaked to reporters, Li expressed enthusiasm for the Google Cloud role in Project Maven, but warned against mentioning its AI component, saying that military AI is linked in the public mind with the danger of autonomous weapons. Asked about those leaked emails, Li told The New York Times, "I believe in human-centered AI to benefit people in positive and benevolent ways. It is deeply against my principles to work on any project that I think is to weaponize AI."[42]
In the fall of 2018, Li left Google and returned to Stanford University to continue her professorship.[43]
Li is also known for her non-profit 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.[44][45][46][47][48] The program was created in collaboration with Melinda French Gates and Jensen Huang.[49][50]
Prior to establishing AI4ALL in 2017, Li and her former student Olga Russakovsky,[51] currently an assistant professor in Princeton University, co-founded and co-directed the precursor program at Stanford called SAILORS (Stanford AI Lab OutReach Summers).[52][53] 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.[53] In 2018, AI4ALL has successfully launched five more summer programs in addition to Stanford, including Princeton University,[54]Carnegie Mellon University,[55]Boston University,[56]University of California Berkeley,[57] and Canada's Simon Fraser University.[58]
We are at a turning point. AI’s influence continues to grow, but representation and inclusion of a diversity of researchers in the field does not. It’s critical that we seize this moment to create structures that will support long-term, positive changes. This won’t happen via a single mechanism or quick fix. It starts with early education and extends to the existing structures of power within academia, work cultures among current AI researchers, and gatekeeping functions of research publishing, to name a few levers of change.
Li has been described as a "researcher bringing humanity to AI."[60]
Li was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021,[61] the National Academy of Engineering in 2020,[62] and the National Academy of Medicine in 2020.[63]
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.[72]
Li's research in computer vision contributed to a line of work called Natural Scene Understanding, or later, story-telling of images.[73] She was recognized for her work in this area by the International Association for Pattern Recognition in 2016.[74] 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.[74]
She teaches the Stanford course CS231n on "Deep Learning for Computer Vision,"[77] whose 2015 version was previously online at Coursera.[78] She has also taught CS131, an introductory class on computer vision.[79]
In May 2020, Li joined the board of directors of Twitter as an independent director.[80] On October 27, 2022, following Elon Musk’s purchase of the company, Li and eight others were removed from Twitter's nine-member board of directors, leaving Elon as the sole director.[81][82]
On 3 August 2023, Li Fei Fei was announced as a member of the United Nations (UN) Scientific Advisory Board, established by Secretary-General António Guterres. She is among seven external scientists on this board, which also includes the Chief Scientists from various UN agencies, the UN University Rector, and the Secretary-General’s Envoy on Technology. The board's primary aim is to offer independent perspectives on emerging trends that intersect science, technology, ethics, governance, and sustainable development. It is designed to act as a central hub for a network of scientific networks, enhancing the integration of scientific insights into UN decision-making processes.[22][83]
Ford, Martin (2018). "Fei-Fei Li". Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building it. Birmingham, UK: Packt Publishing. pp. 145–162. ISBN978-1-78913-126-0. OCLC1083340727. Interview of Li by Ford.[105]
Li, Fei Fei (2023). The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at ahe Dawn Of Ai. New York, NY: Moment of Lift Books, Flatiron Books. ISBN978-1-250-89794-7. OCLC1404458360.[106][107]
Li Fei-Fei; Fergus, R.; Perona, P. (2004). Learning Generative Visual Models from Few Training Examples: An Incremental Bayesian Approach Tested on 101 Object Categories. IEEE. doi:10.1109/CVPR.2004.383.
Li Fei-Fei; Fergus, R.; Perona, P. (2006). "One-shot learning of object categories". IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. 28 (4): 594–611. doi:10.1109/TPAMI.2006.79. ISSN0162-8828. Presented as slides.
^"A U.S. Secret Weapon in A.I.: Chinese Talent". The New York Times. June 9, 2020. The Google team worked to build technology that could automatically identify vehicles, buildings and other objects in video footage captured by drones
^ abConger, Kate (June 1, 2018). "Google Plans Not to Renew Its Contract for Project Maven, a Controversial Pentagon Drone AI Imaging Program". Gizmodo. Retrieved March 18, 2021. Google secured the Project Maven contract in late September, the emails reveal, after competing for months against several other "AI heavyweights" for the work...One of the terms of Google's contract with the Defense Department was that Google's involvement not be mentioned without the company's permission, the emails state.
^Shane, Scott; Wakabayashi, Daisuke (April 4, 2018). "'The Business of War': Google Employees Protest Work for the Pentagon". New York Times. Retrieved March 18, 2021. Thousands of Google employees, including dozens of senior engineers, have signed a letter protesting the company's involvement in a Pentagon program that uses artificial intelligence to interpret video imagery and could be used to improve the targeting of drone strikes.
^Shane, Scott (May 30, 2018). "How a Pentagon Contract Became an Identity Crisis for Google". New York Times. Retrieved March 13, 2021. Asked about her September email, Dr. Li issued a statement: 'I believe in human-centered AI to benefit people in positive and benevolent ways. It is deeply against my principles to work on any project that I think is to weaponize AI.'
^Johnson, Khari (May 17, 2017). "Google unveils second-generation TPU chips to accelerate machine learning". Venture Beat. Retrieved March 30, 2021. Earlier this month, Li joined Melinda Gates and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang to create AI4All, an organization dedicated to encouraging AI adoption among communities underrepresented in AI.
^Yang, Kaiyu; Qinami, Klint; Fei-Fei, Li; Deng, Jia; Russakovsky, Olga (January 27, 2020). "Towards fairer datasets: Filtering and balancing the distribution of the people subtree in the ImageNet hierarchy". Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. FAT* '20. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 547–558. doi:10.1145/3351095.3375709. ISBN978-1-4503-6936-7.
^"Elon Musk, who runs four other companies, will now be Twitter CEO". Reuters. October 31, 2022. 'The following persons, who were directors of Twitter prior to the effective time of the merger, are no longer directors of Twitter: Bret Taylor, Parag Agrawal, Omid Kordestani, David Rosenblatt, Martha Lane Fox, Patrick Pichette, Egon Durban, Fei-Fei Li and Mimi Alemayehou,' Musk said in the filing.
^"Elon Musk Ousts Twitter Board, Named Sole Director". The Wall Street Journal. October 31, 2022. Retrieved November 7, 2022. The board that oversaw Twitter Inc. during its tumultuous sale to Elon Musk has been dissolved, with the Tesla Inc. chief now serving as the social-media company's sole director.