Meet Fei-Fei Li, AI 'godmother' receiving prestigious engineering prize today
What's the story
Professor Fei-Fei Li, often referred to as the "godmother" of artificial intelligence (AI), has said that she is proud to be different. The remark comes ahead of her receiving the prestigious 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering from King Charles III at St James's Palace in the UK today. She is the only woman among seven pioneers of AI being honored with this top engineering award.
Awardees
Other recipients and their contributions
Along with Professor Li, other recipients of the prize are Professor Yoshua Bengio, Dr Bill Dally, Dr Geoffrey Hinton, Professor John Hopfield, NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang, and Meta's Chief AI Scientist Dr Yann LeCun. They are being honored for their contributions to modern machine learning. This technology has been instrumental in the rapid growth of AI.
Journey
Prof Li's journey and her acceptance of 'godmother' title
Born in China and later moving to the US as a teenager, Professor Li has made significant strides in computer science. She is the Co-director of Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute and co-founder/CEO of AI4ALL. Despite initially resisting the title of "godmother," she has come to accept it as a way to inspire young women in STEM fields.
Contributions
Breakthroughs in computer vision
Li is best known for her work on ImageNet, a project that led to major breakthroughs in computer vision. She and her students created large-scale image recognition datasets that form the backbone of many AI technologies today. Looking ahead, she believes the next big advancement in AI will be its ability to interact with its environment, an innate quality of animals and humans.
Discourse
On the ongoing AI debate
Li takes a pragmatic approach to the ongoing debate on AI's potential risks. She believes that both extreme views are concerning and advocates for a more science-based, fact-grounded communication about AI. "I have always advocated for a much more science based, pragmatic method in communicating and educating the public," she said.
Recognition
About the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering
The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering is awarded annually to engineers whose work has had a global impact on humanity. Past winners include Sir Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Lord Vallance, Chairperson of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation, praised this year's winners as "the very best of engineering," noting their work shows how engineering can sustain our planet and transform our lives.