Fei-Fei Li

person · earth · Stanford, California

The computer scientist who conceived and led ImageNet, on the argument — unfashionable when she made it — that the binding constraint on visual recognition was the absence of data at the scale of the real world rather than the design of the algorithms. The 2012 result vindicated that position more decisively than it vindicated any particular architecture. She is also a founding co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, which publishes the annual AI Index, the most widely used compilation of measurements about the field. The pairing is unusual and worth noting: the same person built the dataset that made benchmark-driven progress possible and now co-leads the institution that documents how far benchmark-driven progress can be trusted.