Artificial Intelligence (AI) finds its place all over newspapers and magazines these days. It’s seen as a field ripe for economic impact. Few, however, have followed this field over prior decades when progress quite wasn’t so quick. Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li is one of the researchers who helped lay the foundation for modern AI. Here, she tells her personal story alongside the story of this field. She reminds us that human considerations should never voyage far from technological advances.

Li herself has a story to tell. Born in China, her parents saw her prospects dwindle as the Cultural Revolution suppressed scientific education. So over the next few years, they emigrated to New Jersey. Young Fei-Fei, then a pre-teen, had to learn a new language. She privately read western classics by Charles Dickens or Mark Twain in Chinese, but publicly struggled to express herself in the English language. A high school teacher first recognized her innate intelligence. She eventually won a scholarship to nearby Princeton University, where she studied physics from Nobel laureates.

By itself, that biography inspires, yet her story deepens further. Li continued onto graduate school to study image processing. She became obsessed with getting computers to be able to recognize images and translate their contents into language. As faculty running her own lab, she eventually succeeded by pioneering ImageNet with collaborators. And she succeeded as an immigrant and as a woman in a male-dominated field. By achieving prominence, she grabbed a seat to witness firsthand the earliest launchings of AI, empowered by the ability to interpret images.

Now she works at Stanford University in Silicon Valley. She has taken a sabbatical by working at Google. She cares for her ailing parents who sacrificed so that she could become a scientist. She is married and has a family. Now, she has founded a research center on human-centered AI – the ethical task of ensuring that AI serves and benefits humanity. As a software developer, I find human considerations often the hardest part of software. Alongside an international chorus of researchers, she hopes to guide us.

This biography touches on many themes for audiences. The computer tale is central. Anyone curious about what AI might do (and who isn’t?) can gain insights from reading this journey. Biographies of computer scientists often lack a deep human side; Li’s memoir, thankfully, avoids this trap. The story of a determined scientist also looms, a plot with a strong female protagonist. She is an immigrant, one of the people often picked upon politically but so essential to building America. Li never strays far from fundamental human themes instilled from her mother and her high school teacher. Remaining humble and curious, she inspires readers do the same. ( )