Fei-Fei Li

Fei-Fei Li is a computer scientist whose research has helped shape modern computer vision. Born in Beijing and educated in the United States, she earned a physics degree at Princeton University and a doctorate in electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology. She joined Stanford University in 2009 after earlier academic appointments, building a research program around visual understanding.

Li led the development of ImageNet, a large, organized collection of labeled images introduced in 2009. The project supplied data and a shared evaluation setting that helped researchers compare approaches to recognizing objects. The later success of deep neural networks on ImageNet made the dataset an important part of the field’s transition toward deep learning.

At Stanford, Li became a co-founder of the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, launched in 2019. She also co-founded the educational organization AI4ALL, which seeks to broaden participation in AI. These efforts connect technical research with questions about who builds AI systems, whose needs they serve, and how people learn to participate in their development.

Li co-founded World Labs in 2024 and became its CEO, pursuing spatial intelligence: systems that can represent and reason about three-dimensional environments. This direction extends her longstanding interest in visual perception beyond image recognition. Her career combines foundational datasets, academic leadership, educational access, and the development of new approaches to understanding the physical world.