"If I win the Nobel Prize, I hope to accept it as a Chinese."
When it comes to artificial intelligence, we first think of ChatGPT, which caught fire some time ago, in fact, as early as 2009, a Chinese girl had delved into artificial intelligence, and at that time, artificial intelligence was still an unpopular field.
This Chinese girl is the AI goddess Li Feifei.
Li Feifei, a name that is too common to be common, but the experience behind her has written the extraordinary life of a Chinese woman.
Li Feifei was born in Beijing and grew up in Chengdu. Both parents were high-ranking intellectuals, Dad was an engineer, and Mom was a people's teacher. Since childhood, Li Feifei has been very rich both materially and spiritually.
She inherited her parents' high IQ and academic traits, and she must be at the top of her class in every exam, especially in math and science.
Her parents noticed her talent at an early age, but they were also well aware that the domestic educational environment at that time had certain limitations. For the better development of the child, after weighing up, they decided to take Li Feifei to the United States.
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At that time, going to the United States was not an easy task, and the first thing to solve was the problem of money.
This is not a small amount, after borrowing all the relatives and friends, the family of three finally scraped together enough money to travel to the United States.
Like the gold diggers of the day, they thought that coming to the United States was the beginning of a dream, but the illusion was quickly shattered the moment they set foot on American soil.
The first thing they had to face was the language problem.
The newcomer family did not speak English, and even simple daily communication could not be carried out, and life suddenly entered a dilemma, relying on the dictionary every day to learn how to communicate with the locals.
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Another, bigger question looms over them, and that is how to live in America.
Although he is a high-level intellectual, Li Feifei's parents can't find a job in the United States, and in order to make a living, his father found a job repairing electronic products, and his mother worked as a cashier in a supermarket.
That year, Li Feifei was only sixteen years old, and she knew that her family was hard, so in addition to going to school, Li Feifei washed dishes in Chinese restaurants, worked as a cleaner, and worked part-time to subsidize the family.
At that time, there were only two years left before Shen University, and she could only sleep 4 hours a day while working, attending classes, and studying English.
Although the time for study was pitiful, Li Feifei was finally admitted to Princeton University's physics major with a full score of SAT1250 and mathematics, and received a full scholarship.
As one of the Ivy League schools, Princeton University is notoriously difficult to admit, and Li Feifei, who had difficulty even with language communication two years ago, actually successfully entered the Ivy League school with his super learning talent and extraordinary perseverance.
Even the local newspaper interviewed the report, and the headline of the newspaper that year was "The 'American Dream' Comes True!" 》。
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In a conversation between Feifei Li and Andrew Wu (visiting professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University), she said:
One thing physics taught me was a passion for asking big questions and seeking your "North Star."
She added: "The real challenge for me is that you need to reach your full potential while juggling your responsibilities and then staying true to your heart. ”
From this to the end, Li Feifei is very clear about what she wants, no matter what the general environment is, no matter how others evaluate, she is only loyal to her heart.
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After Li Feifei graduated from Princeton University, the consulting industry situation was very good, and top consulting companies Goldman Sachs and McKinsey had extended olive branches to her.
If it is for a better life, accepting this offer may bring qualitative improvement to the quality of life of her and her family.
But she refused, and made a decision that everyone found "incomprehensible."
Wanting to explore the mysteries between Eastern and Western philosophy and science, and that Chinese medicine and Tibetan medicine were the best way to understand Chinese culture, she decided to go to Tibet.
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In the end, after two rounds of defense on the topic "Comparison of Tibetan Medicine and Western Medicine", she stood out from more than 1,200 competitors and became the only person to receive the Martin Dale 1953 Scholarship from Princeton University that year.
She then returned to campus to pursue a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Caltech.
In 2005, after graduation, Li Feifei successfully entered the artificial intelligence laboratory of Stanford University.
Since then, Li Feifei has truly found her "North Star" and started her AI journey.
Although he has become the first Stanford "Sequoia Capital Professor" envied by everyone, Li Feifei has never hidden his "part-time work experience" in front of people.
I believe that many people find it difficult to associate the experience of working as a cleaner, cashier in a Chinese restaurant, helping people walk their dogs, and opening dry cleaners with Stanford's youngest professor.
After entering Princeton University, although the tuition fee has increased, the cost of living is also a big problem.
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In order to ensure her studies and life, she decided to open a dry cleaner with her family.
Because dry cleaners are only open on weekends, you can share a lot of in-store work every weekend without delaying your studies.
Every Monday to Friday, her proud daughter, a top student at Princeton University, puts on an apron and circles the washing machine on weekends.
Although it was a very busy and difficult time, she always thought it was a time to cherish.
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During her graduate school, her mother suddenly found cancer and stroke, and her father was busy with work, and the burden of taking care of her sick mother fell on Li Feifei.
Recalling this past, Li Feifei sighed, "The most realistic survival challenge is how to go all out, how to take on heavy responsibilities and honestly face the dreams in my heart." ”
But it is precisely because of this experience that she has learned that many medical projects can be carried out by intelligent means.
Technology may be able to improve people's medical conditions, or perhaps the seeds of artificial intelligence have been buried deep in her heart since then.
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After graduating with a doctorate, Li Feifei officially embarked on the road of artificial intelligence.
When she entered the Stanford artificial laboratory, there were many hot directions in the field of artificial intelligence at that time, and she chose the least favored computer vision recognition, which has been stagnant.
Many peers in the scientific research circle have advised her to give up and change to a popular direction, because this not only cannot pull funds, but also may not be able to evaluate professors for a lifetime.
But Li Feifei did not flinch, in order to allow computers to accurately recognize pictures, she downloaded nearly 1 billion pictures from the Internet through screening, sorting and labeling, and successfully established a picture library of 15 million.
This is ImageNet.
In her own words, the workload here is equivalent to a person working for 20 years without eating, drinking or sleeping.
ImageNet is an image recognition database, and its birth has had a profound impact on the development of artificial intelligence.
As long as it is used on a computer, it can directly identify objects and people.
Then she made another unexpected decision.
As the founder of ImageNet, she decided to make the ImageNet database open and freely available to scientific teams around the world for computer image recognition training.
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Since then, the computer science community around the world can enjoy this database for free.
This has also triggered the explosive development of artificial intelligence, bringing AI from the laboratory to the public's vision.
Behind these achievements, the contribution of this Chinese female scholar Li Feifei cannot be described as great.
In an interview, Li Feifei also couldn't avoid the question faced by all Chinese scientists: Do you think you are Chinese or American?
Li Feifei said without thinking:
"Of course I am a Chinese, I love my country. If I win a Nobel Prize one day, I wish I would accept it as an Chinese! ”
After graduating from Caltech, at the age of 33, she was named a tenured associate professor at Stanford University.
She has also served as a scholar at the W.M. Keck School at Stanford University, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and co-director of the Stanford Anthropcentric Institute for Artificial Intelligence (HAI).
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Li Feifei has devoted a lot of time and effort to the field of artificial intelligence, and she has published more than 100 papers in authoritative computer journals and cited 44,773 times.
It can be said that Li Feifei's development in the field of artificial intelligence is unparalleled.
Despite her aura, she never forgot her Chinese identity.
In 2017, 41-year-old Li Feifei was invited by Google to become a vice president and serve as the chief scientist of Google Cloud AI.
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Under her active promotion, Google AI China Center was officially established in Beijing, which is also Google's first AI research center in Asia.
At the Google Developer Conference, Li Feifei said: "I have witnessed China come to the forefront of the world in AI basic research, entrepreneurship, and development... The center will work with our AI research groups around the world, including New York, Toronto, London and Zurich, to make AI work better for all of humanity. ”
The establishment of Google AI China Center provides a stage for Chinese scientists to connect with the world, which also promotes the development of artificial intelligence in China.
For various reasons, Li Feifei left Google and chose to return to Stanford to continue to promote the development of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and is committed to the application of AI in the medical field.
During the pandemic, her team's 8-year paper on the use of artificial intelligence sensors and AI algorithms to help improve the medical services of patients and clinicians was successfully published in Nature, and explored AI home systems to monitor patients' physical conditions.
In 2020, Li Feifei, the "Chinese AI Goddess", was successfully elected as an academician of the American Academy of Engineering.
After the list of finalists was announced, Li Feifei simply tweeted: "Thank you! I sincerely hope that AI can help our clinicians and patients by improving medical care. ”
In her experience, we have seen the inspirational life of a Chinese woman in the United States, and we have seen parents working hard for their children's growth and talents, and we have seen excellent girls constantly breaking the professional ceiling.
Today, if we look at the first half of Li Feifei's life, we will find that this kind of enthusiasm and tenacity that follows her heart has always run through her behavior trajectory.
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In fact, the so-called counterattack is far from as simple as we think, especially as a Chinese woman, in the field of AI with very little voice.
But her experience also tells us that no matter how low our starting point is and how bumpy the process is, as long as we follow our hearts and persevere, we will definitely see the dawn of success.
After all, there is no casual success, but the weight behind the back.