Trailblazing Computer Scientist Fei-Fei Li on Human-Centered AI

Short Wave

NPR

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4.7 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 10 November 2023

⏱️ 11 minutes

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Summary

AI is popping up everywhere nowadays. From medicine to science to the Hollywood strikes. Today, with computer scientist and AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, we dig deeper into the history of the field, how machines really learn and how computer scientists take inspiration from the human brain in their work. Li's new memoir The Worlds I See traces the history of her move to the U.S. from China as a high school student and her coming-of-age with AI.

Host Regina G. Barber talks to Li about her memoir, where the field may be going and the importance of centering humans in the development of new technology.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:05.0	Faye Faye Lee has been called the Godmother of artificial intelligence or AI
0:10.0	and although she's a computer scientist at Stanford now,
0:12.8	her journey in science began with physics.
0:15.3	I just loved Albert Einstein.
0:17.7	I loved it so much.
0:18.8	I went to Princeton University and majored in physics.
0:22.2	What captivated Faye, the bold way physicist questioned everything unknown.
0:27.0	What's the smallest particles that make up atoms?
0:31.0	What is the boundary of the universe, what is the beginning of time?
0:35.0	These questions stayed with her, from her childhood in Chengdu China to arriving in the U.S.
0:39.6	with her parents as a 15-year-old and into college.
0:43.2	It was there where she started reading works from famous physicists
0:46.3	and asking some new questions.
0:48.6	And I start to realize these physicists
0:52.1	who spend their life wondering about atomic world, physical world,
0:57.0	also wonders about a world that is equally
1:05.0	audacious, but seems even harder to answer,
1:09.0	and that is about life, about intelligence.
1:13.6	One summer in college, Fay Faye did an internship at UC Berkeley.
1:17.4	The team she joined would be studying molecular neuroscience and biology, and Faye Faye
1:21.8	worried she'd feel at a place as a physics student.
	...

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