On July 19, 2022, 13 members of the Forbes Science and Technology Council Expert Group, a top authoritative ranking magazine, jointly selected 13 of the most influential contemporary leaders in the field of science and technology.
Amazon founders Jeff Bezos, Elon Max, Steve Jobs and other industry leaders have been shortlisted, but the most eye-catching in the list is also the Chinese female scientist Li Feifei.
At the age of 16, Li Feifei followed his parents from Chengdu, Sichuan Province, to New Jersey to start a new life.
Life in a foreign country is far from being as beautiful as imagined, in order to save enough tuition, Li Feifei can only study during the day and work at night, making good use of all her free time, at that time she was determined to change her fate through reading.
Li Feifei
In 2009, at the age of 36, Li Feifei joined the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to teach and was offered a tenured associate professorship.
Since then, Li Feifei has been elected as an academician of the National Academy of Engineering, an academician of the Medical College, and an academician of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences with his outstanding contributions in the field of deep learning and artificial intelligence.
Although she has lived in the United States for nearly thirty years, she has not forgotten her motherland and forgotten that she is a Chinese.
In an interview with the media, she once said: "When I was very young, I secretly swore: If one day I can win the Nobel Prize, I must be on the podium as a Chinese." ”
Li Feifei
Cross the ocean and turn the tables against the wind
Li Feifei was born in 1976 in Beijing, China. Later, with the needs of his parents' work, Li Feifei came to Chengdu with his parents to live.
After graduating from primary school, she successfully entered the Chengdu No. 7 Middle School, a key high school in Sichuan Province, but her original step-by-step life underwent earth-shaking changes when she was 16 years old.
Looking back on those days now, Li Feifei feels as if a tree that originally grew quietly in his homeland was suddenly uprooted and moved to another land to survive.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the pace of reform and opening up accelerated, there was an unprecedented wave of going abroad in China, and many Chinese tried to study abroad and start a business. Li Feifei's parents, who have a high level of education, are also among them.
Reform
In early 1992, 16-year-old Li Feifei followed his parents across the ocean to settle in New Jersey. However, going to the United States does not mean that he can live the ideal good life, Li Feifei in China, the parents with higher education have a stable and high salary income, the family lives a relatively superior life.
However, after arriving in the United States, parents who did not pass the English test could not engage in difficult jobs, and were forced to work odd jobs to maintain food and clothing.
In order to reduce the burden on her family, Li Feifei in addition to school, the rest of the free time as far as possible to work, she in the United States as a Chinese restaurant waiter, telephone operator, handed out flyers and so on.
In addition to the huge economic pressure, the huge cultural differences between China and the West and the lack of English speaking have become another huge problem for her.
Li Feifei
In China, Li Feifei only accepted english courses to cope with the exams, never received any systematic English learning, and was completely unable to communicate with the school classmates normally.
Especially in the first year of high school in the United States, Li Feifei not only did not make a good friend due to severe language barriers, but even the daily courses she learned were very difficult, after all, there were many professional terms she had never seen before. Li Feifei knows that complaining has no effect, and only by working hard to overcome the predicament can we face the light.
In order to get rid of the difficulties caused by the lack of language proficiency as soon as possible, Li Feifei took advantage of all the opportunities of ESL English cram classes and odd jobs to continuously practice spoken English to accumulate vocabulary.
In less than a year, Li Feifei was able to speak a natural and smooth spoken English, and even understand some unique accents in the United States.
Li Feifei
It takes high tuition fees to attend top universities in the United States, but Li Feifei's family is simply unable to afford this cost.
With the help of his teachers, Li Feifei learned that many top universities in the United States will give some high-achieving students a high amount of scholarships every year, which is enough to cover most of the costs during their school years.
However, if you want to get a scholarship, you must come up with an extremely excellent report card, and it is gratifying that Li Feifei has done it with hundreds of days and nights of unremitting efforts and outstanding learning talent.
In 1995, when he graduated from high school, Li Feifei was successfully admitted to the Physics Department of Princeton University, one of the world's top universities, with a high score of SAT 1250, and received a full scholarship.
At that time, the local newspaper in New Jersey also reported on her, after all, such excellent results are difficult for many local students in the United States to achieve.
Li Feifei
Give up high-paying offers and plunge into the WORLD OF AI
As early as during his undergraduate studies in the Physics Department of Princeton University, Li Feifei had already been associated with artificial intelligence and neurobiology in the dark.
In the process of studying physics, she found that many physicists such as Einstein and Schrödinger began to shift the direction of thinking from physics to biology as early as the early 20th century.
During her undergraduate studies, Li Feifei will use the summer vacation every year to do some summer internships related to life sciences, and in the continuous learning and accumulation, she is deeply fascinated by this discipline.
Therefore, she also chose to go to California Institute of Technology to study cognitive neurobiology and artificial intelligence during her phD.
In 1999, Li Feifei successfully graduated from Princeton University.
Li Feifei
That year, the entire U.S. job market was in a bullish state, and the employment situation was very good. Not to mention Li Feifei, who graduated from a top school, received high-paying offers from goldman Sachs, McKinsey and other investment banks and consulting firms.
For her family's difficulties, this is a good opportunity to get out of trouble, so that the whole family can live a rich middle-class life.
But Li Feifei did not go with the flow, she made a bold and crazy decision in the eyes of ordinary people, to go to Tibet, China to study Tibetan medicine, in search of the essence and charm of Eastern philosophy and life sciences.
In order to receive the annual scholarship of Princeton University as a funding for a study tour to Tibet, Li Feifei paid unimaginable hardships to ordinary people, and finally stood out among more than 1,200 competitors and became the only recipient of such scholarships that year.
Princeton University
During those days in Tibet, although his life was particularly poor, Li Feifei was very happy and felt that the spiritual world was exceptionally full and rich.
After returning to the United States, Li Feifei chose to continue his studies and entered the California Institute of Technology to pursue a master's degree and a doctorate, engaged in the field of artificial intelligence and computational neuroscience research, which was very unpopular at the time.
In 2000, Li Feifei began to study for a doctorate, when artificial intelligence was far less sought after than today, in the eyes of the public, artificial intelligence technology seemed to be in a pure hibernation state and there was no development, but she did not admit defeat and felt that research in this field was promising.
During his doctoral studies, Li Feifei's mother suffered from cancer and stroke, and the life of Li Feifei's family, which was originally not rich in economy, was even more difficult.
Li Feifei
Even if life is so hard, Li Feifei still survived, she once said in an interview: "The biggest challenge in life is actually to live up to your greatest potential and responsibility, and to be honest in the pursuit of the cause you want to pursue, worthy of your dreams." ”
In 2005, Feifei Li received her Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and neurobiology from the California Institute of Technology, and after graduation, she came to Stanford University as an assistant professor.
At the same time, she joined the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to start research on machines in the field of image recognition, and invested a lot of time and energy into the "bottomless pit" image recognition technology, which is an unpopular research field.
The field of artificial intelligence was not as hot as it is now, and this forward-looking scientific research at the time was a bit crazy in the eyes of most people.
Many senior colleagues around Li Feifei advised her: "Feifei, you still don't want to do this project, just find a new way out." This will not only lead to no results, but may also have a bad impact on your selection of tenured professorships. ”
Li Feifei
In addition to the time-consuming and laborious, Li Feifei's team also faces a bigger problem, that is, lack of funding. They have applied for State funding many times but not once.
In desperation, the team tried to use some algorithmic cleverness to minimize the cost, and Li Feifei himself spent a lot of time doing some chores and tiring work.
The team's staff even quipped: "It's really not okay for us to open a laundromat or wash the car, and we can make more money." ”
In continuous in-depth research, Li Feifei has obtained new inspiration from the child's observation of the world's actions, inspired by the recognition process of the human eye on the image, and realized that if the machine wants to learn to read the image, it needs to train through massive data and train continuously.
In 2007, she partnered with Princeton University Professor Kai Li to launch a program called Image Net, in which they downloaded nearly 1 billion alternative photos on the Internet and then categorized, labeled and sorted them. However, due to the excessive workload, the research funds were spent in less than a month.
Li Feifei
Just when everyone was at a loss, one of Li Feifei's doctoral students came up with an idea to seek help from Turkish robots, Amazon's crowdsourcing platform.
In this way, Li Feifei's team spent nearly three years using the platform and 50,000 network workers from 167 countries around the world to complete the marking of nearly 1 billion photos, creating a milestone project in the history of artificial intelligence.
After the success, Li Feifei did not stop from then on, but open sourced the image net database for every laboratory in academia and business to mobilize more forces to improve this emerging technology.
In 2010, scientists from Stanford University, Princeton University and Columbia University launched a large-scale visual identity challenge.
After that, the addition of convolutional neural network models reduced the error rate of image recognition technology to 16%, which greatly increased the accuracy rate of image recognition technology.
Li Feifei
End your Google tour and return to the Stanford campus
After working in stanford University's artificial intelligence laboratory for many years, Li Feifei decided to enter the academic sabbatical period, and after leaving her teaching position, she chose to join Google Cloud, which is responsible for the enterprise computing business of Google.
In January 2017, Google officially announced that Li Feifei will join Google as a vice president and lead the team to carry out artificial intelligence development work.
The most important reason why she made this decision is that she wants to further expand the scope of her research while helping the company operate, and to have a deeper understanding of the universal value of artificial intelligence in various verticals.
In the days when she first entered the Google Cloud work, Li Feifei was full of passion and vitality, after all, compared with the university campus, in Google Cloud, she can learn more abundant and high-quality data such as finance, media, and entertainment, so as to boost her research process.
Li Feifei
Under her leadership, the R&D team has launched a number of A I tools for public use, hoping to enable more enterprises or individuals without relevant professional capabilities to effectively use AI.
In addition, her most influential act during her tenure at Google was to promote the establishment of the Google A I China Center, which she said at the Google China Developer Conference in Shanghai:
"Artificial intelligence has no borders, and the well-being of artificial intelligence also has no borders. As a Chinese, it is most appropriate for me to lead the Google China Center, and I hope that artificial intelligence technology can make the whole world a better place. ”
However, a year and a half after Li Feifei was employed, he was embroiled in the dispute over Google's project maven contract with the U.S. Department of Defense.
Li Feifei
Although she was not directly involved in the project, it was implemented by the department she led. Therefore, she has always been regarded as an ethical benchmark in the field of artificial intelligence, and she has also encountered public opinion attacks from all walks of life.
According to the contract signed by the two sides, the US Department of Defense is likely to use this technology to interpret video images and help military drones attack hostile targets.
Many employees were furious when they heard about it, strongly opposing the use of their hard-earned technology in war, and nearly 4,000 employees wrote a protest letter asking the company to issue a statement promising not to use the technology for military purposes.
Under pressure from all sides, Google had to terminate cooperation with the US Department of Defense and issued a public guideline promising: "Google's artificial intelligence technology will only be used to benefit society, and will not allow tools to harm human beings." ”
Li Feifei
I don't know if this storm has caused too bad an impact on Li Feifei, or whether she has already decided to return to academic life.
In the early morning of September 11, 2018, the head of Google Cloud officially announced on his official blog that Li Feifei stepped down as the head of Artificial Intelligence of Google Cloud and returned to stanford University to teach.
During the COVID-19 epidemic in 2020, Li Feifei also used his strength to actively participate in the anti-epidemic work.
She led the team of stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to use artificial intelligence sensors, computer vision technology and other technologies to develop an artificial intelligence medical system that can be used to monitor the physical condition of patients infected with the virus virus with COVID-19 in real time, and is committed to making artificial intelligence technology useful in the medical field.
Li Feifei
For artificial intelligence technology, Li Feifei hopes that it can continue to develop in the research of basic science, especially the combination of cognition and understanding human intelligence, what she is most looking forward to and most hoping to promote is the universal value of artificial intelligence, which can benefit many people and many industries, industries...
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