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Sequoia Capital Professor, Denning Co-Director (On Leave) of Stanford HAI, Senior Fellow at HAI and Professor, by courtesy, of Operations, Information and Technology at the Graduate School of Business

Fei-Fei Li

Sequoia Capital Professor, Denning Co-Director (On Leave) of Stanford HAI, Senior Fellow at HAI and Professor, by courtesy, of Operations, Information and Technology at the Graduate School of Business
Dr. Fei-Fei Li is the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, and a Founding Co-Director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute. She served as the Director of Stanford’s AI Lab from 2013 to 2018. And during her sabbatical from Stanford from January 2017 to September 2018, Dr. Li was Vice President at Google and served as Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud. Since then she has served as a Board member or advisor in various public or private companies. She is currently a Co-founder/CEO of World Labs, an AI company focusing on Spatial Intelligence and generative AI.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li obtained her B.A. degree in physics from Princeton in 1999 with High Honors, and her PhD degree in electrical engineering from California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2005. She has been recognized as the Distinguished Alumni by both Princeton and Caltech in 2020 and 2024 respectively. Dr. Li also holds a Doctorate Degree (Honorary) from Harvey Mudd College.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li’s current research interests include AI, machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, robotic learning, and ambient intelligence for healthcare delivery. In the past she has also worked on cognitive and computational neuroscience. Dr. Li has published more than 400 scientific articles in top-tier journals and conferences in science, engineering and computer science. Dr. Li is the inventor of ImageNet and the ImageNet Challenge, a critical large-scale dataset and benchmarking effort that has been widely regarded as one of the three driving forces of the birth of modern AI and deep learning revolution. In 2023, Dr. Li published a science memoir called “The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration and Discovery at the Dawn of AI”, published by Macmillan Publishers.

Dr. Li has been working with policymakers nationally and locally to ensure positive and human-centered progress in AI technologies, including a number of U.S. Senate and Congressional testimonies, her service as a special advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations, a member of the California Future of Work Commission for the Governor of California in 2019 - 2020, and a member of the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Task Force (NAIRR) for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2021-2022. She has delivered numerous speeches including to the President of the United States, and the Security Council of the United Nations.

Dr. Li is an elected Member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) and American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS). She is also a Fellow of ACM, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Among her many recognitions, Dr. Li is a laureate of the VinFuture Prize (2024), a recipient of the Intel Lifetime Achievements Award (2023), the IEEE PAMI Thomas Huang Memorial Prize (2022), the IEEE PAMI Longuet-Higgins Prize (2019), the National Geographic Society Further Award (2019), the IAPR J.K. Aggarwal Prize (2016), the IEEE PAMI Mark Everingham Award (2016), the Alfred Sloan Faculty Award (2011), the NSF CAREER award (2009), the Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship (2006), among others. Dr. Li is a keynote speaker at many academic or influential conferences, including the World Economics Forum (Davos), the Grace Hopper Conference 2017 and the TED2015 and TED2024. Work from Dr. Li's work been extensively reported in all major media outlet. She was recognized as one of the Time Magazine AI100 influencers in 2023, Women in Tech by the ELLE Magazine (2017), a Global Thinker of 2015 by Foreign Policy, and one of the “Great Immigrants: The Pride of America” in 2016 by the Carnegie Foundation, past winners include Albert Einstein, Yoyo Ma, Sergey Brin, et al.

(Dr. Li publishes under the name L. Fei-Fei)

Education

Ph.D. (Honorary), Harvey Mudd College, Engineering (2022)
B.A., Princeton University, Physics (1999)
Master, California Institute of Technology, Electrical Engineering (2001)
PhD, California Institute of Technology, Electrical Engineering (2005)