Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

2020-05-14 14:20:21

Author | Nian Suqing

Editor in charge | Wu Xingling

Product | Program Life (ID:coder_life)

Recently, Twitter announced the appointment of Li Feifei, a professor of computer science at Stanford University and a former vice president of Google, as an independent director of the board.

"Twitter is an important platform for connecting technology to the world, and I am honored to be a member of the board at such an important moment in the history of Twitter," Li Feifei said. "

Speaking of Li Feifei, her name is almost unknown in AI circles. She is not only the director and tenured professor of AI laboratory at Stanford, but also the founder of AI today. However, you may not know the story behind her along the way.

From a dishwasher to a top student in a famous school

Li Feifei was born in Beijing in 1976 and grew up in Sichuan. Li Feifei's father left the country with his wife and daughter to fly to the other side of the ocean in order to pursue his dream of an engineer and a scientist, so Li Feifei moved to New Jersey with his parents at the age of 16.

The ideal is very plump, but the reality is very bony. After arriving in the United States, Li Feifei's family suddenly fell into a dilemma because of the language barrier. In order to make ends meet, one of her parents went to fix the camera and the other became a cashier. For the sake of their daughter's studies, the parents rushed everywhere for help, and after several twists and turns, Li Feifei was sent to a local middle school.

In order to help his parents reduce the family's financial burden, Li Feifei went to school while washing dishes and cleaning in Chinese restaurants in Chinatown. You know, Li Feifei is only two years away from the beginning of college. If she wants to enter a good university, she must quickly overcome the language barrier in a limited time. In order to learn English well and get excellent grades in all subjects, Li Feifei works while attending classes. When he is most tired, he can only sleep four hours a day.

Li Feifei graduated from high school and was admitted to MIT, Rutgers University and Princeton University. Later, because she preferred universities with comprehensive humanities, she finally entered the Physics Department of Princeton University and won a full scholarship. At that time, the news caused a sensation in the whole town where Li Feifei's family was located. Li Feifei became a local star, and some newspapers even published her story entitled "the American Dream has come true."

Give up a high salary and go to Xizang

In 1999, Li Feifei graduated from university. At that time, the American job market was very good. It can be said that she was not looking for a job, but a job was looking for her, like Li Feifei, a graduate from Princeton University. There were many job opportunities and a considerable starting salary. But Li Feifei rejected the olive branch extended to her by dozens of well-known companies, such as McKinsey and Goldman Sachs.

Li Feifei believes that the job she wants is not a job that will make her successful, nor is it just to get another doctorate, so that she can immediately move from one prestigious school to another, and from one laboratory to another.

Li Feifei once said: "for me, the real challenge is that you need to reach your full potential, take care of your responsibilities, and then be true to your heart." She always seems to know what she wants, and she also knows how to be "true to her heart". She has always wanted to try, to explore the mysteries of Eastern and Western philosophy and science, to be a bridge between Eastern and Western cultures.

In Li Feifei's eyes, traditional Chinese medicine and Tibetan medicine are the best entry points to understand Chinese culture, so she decided to go to Xizang. In order to win Princeton University's annual Martin Dale1953 Scholarship as funding for Tibet, Li Feifei stood out among more than 1200 competitors after two rounds of interviews and defense on the subject of "comparison of Tibetan Medicine and Western Medicine." he became the only one in that class of students who got the scholarship.

The difficult way of AI Research

After Xizang returned to the United States, Li Feifei began his second stage of study, studying for a doctorate at the California Institute of Technology and receiving a doctorate in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 2005.

After graduating from his doctorate, Li Feifei entered the artificial intelligence laboratory of Stanford University and chose the field of computer vision recognition, which was not favored at that time.

Although image recognition is hot at present, it is very unpopular at that time. But Li Feifei doesn't care. She never values what is hottest and what makes the most money, but what she wants to learn and what she thinks is the most important.

Artificial intelligence in 2007 is an extremely unpopular field, so few people know about it that people simply cannot understand the significance of this research, and some people even threaten that it is a disgrace to institutions of higher learning to support such research.

Under such circumstances, Li Feifei's research is very difficult. First of all, she could not apply for funding at all, and in desperation, she even had to use the money earned by her family's laundry to subsidize her project research; second, without funds, no one would want to join in. Li Feifei spared no effort to persuade a student to study with her.

After a period of research, Li Feifei's project made no progress, and some professors advised her to do something useful for tenure instead of wasting her time on the project. But Li Feifei decided that he would not give up easily.

After two and a half years, Li Feifei built a data set called "ImageNet". In 2009, Li Feifei's team released relevant papers and data sets.

However, such painstaking efforts are paid in return for disdain from others, and relevant researchers feel that it is impossible to improve the algorithm by relying on a large amount of data. At a CVPR (a cutting-edge conference in the field of computer vision), the organizers mercilessly refused Li Feifei's request to give a speech, only allowing them to display a small poster at the venue.

The youngest professor at Stanford

At the end of 2009, Li Feifei added an additional task of using algorithms to locate images in ImageNet, and made a rapid breakthrough in research progress, and issued five papers in one go.

Li Feifei thinks this is not enough at all. She wants more people to know about the dataset and the role of image recognition. So she went to Europe to find the organizers of the famous image recognition competition and successfully persuaded them to adopt ImageNet. The researchers found that their algorithm performed better when using ImageNet data sets. So more and more people began to participate in the ImageNet competition, then the technology giants Google, Amazon, Facebook and other companies have asked the competition to continue.

After the ImageNet contest, researchers finally realized that data and algorithms are equally important, it has solved many problems in the development of artificial intelligence, but also led to the blowout development of artificial intelligence, once little-known artificial intelligence began to enter the public's field of vision. The driving force behind all this is Li Feifei, a young Chinese female scholar.

Li Feifei opened ImageNet for free trial by researchers around the world. She herself continued to stay in the lab, devoting all her energies to AI research. During this period, she has published more than 100 papers in authoritative computer journals, with 44773 citations.

In view of Li Feifei's outstanding achievements in the AI field, Stanford University granted her a tenured professorship at the age of 33, becoming the youngest professor in the computer science department. In 2015, Li Feifei was selected as one of the top 100 thinkers in the world. In February this year, Professor Li Feifei was elected as an academician of the National Academy of Engineering.

Strive to promote Google AI to enter China

In January 2017, Li Feifei joined Google as chief scientist of Google Cloud AI.

From doing academic research in universities to working in enterprises, Li Feifei explained: "the important thing is not to be an academic or an enterprise, but how to make human life better through artificial intelligence."

She said that artificial intelligence has gone through the stage of 0-3 years old, and 3-10 years old is the most difficult and critical period, this stage needs to be completed by industry, Google is undoubtedly the best choice. For Google, with Li Feifei's influence in the field of artificial intelligence, she has almost become the face of Google AI.

During Li Feifei's tenure, she actively promoted the construction of Google AI China Center.

Li Feifei led the Google AI team to participate in the Google developer Conference held in Shanghai on December 13, 2017. At the meeting, Li Feifei said: "I have witnessed that China has stepped into the forefront of the world in AI basic research, entrepreneurship and development. Great achievements have been made in the ImageNet image recognition contest, Kaggle's AI programming competition platform and basic scientific research. Today, my team and I returned to China, hoping to start a long-term and sincere work to create the future. This center will work with our AI research teams around the world, including New York, Toronto, London and Zurich, to make artificial intelligence better serve all mankind. "

At present, the Google AI China Center will focus on basic AI research and establish a sustainable partnership with Chinese academia to provide high-quality AI and machine learning education support to more Chinese students and researchers. All this is inseparable from the great promotion of Li Feifei.

"I'm Chinese."

A media once interviewed Li Feifei and asked, "you have lived in the United States for decades, so do you think you are American or Chinese now?"

Li Feifei replied firmly: "of course I am Chinese!"

Li Feifei said that when she was very young, she swore that if she could receive the Nobel Prize one day, she would accept it as a Chinese. Even if it is a dream, a dream can always be done. She respects the choice of others as to whether she is a Chinese or a foreigner, but she is a Chinese for her own personal identity.

In 1997, Li Feifei was a sophomore at Princeton University, the 60th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre. Li Feifei, together with several undergraduate students around him, organized the "report meeting on the 60th Anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre" and invited scholars from all over the world to participate in lectures, reports and exchanges. In ten months, they raised a total of 35000 dollars. Finally, more than 300 scholars from all over the world attended the conference. With regard to the contents of the meeting and the discussion speech report, Li Feifei and others spent several years collating and editing a book, which was released and published in 2001.

I wonder what technological reforms Li Feifei will bring to Twitter after he takes office. Let's wait and see!

Reference link:

Https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E6%9D%8E%E9%A3%9E%E9%A3%9E/7448630?fr=aladdin

Https://blog.csdn.net/UFv59to8/article/details/83964937

Https://m.sohu.com/a/289791852_639570

Https://blog.csdn.net/ZZQHELLO2018/article/details/83745171

Https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/44331177

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