AI 'godmother' Fei-Fei Li says she is 'proud to be different'

"I would not call myself godmother of anything,"

"pause and recognise if I rejected this, it would miss an opportunity for women scientists and technologists to be recognised this way"

"Because men are pretty easily called godfathers or founding fathers."

"For all the young women I work with and the generations of girls to come, I'm okay now accepting this title,"

Professor Fei-Fei Li and six colleagues will receive the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for foundational work enabling modern machine learning. Honorees include Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, John Hopfield, Bill Dally and Jensen Huang. Recognition centers on advances in large-scale datasets, deep learning architectures and breakthroughs in computer vision, notably the ImageNet project. Li has accepted the 'godmother' label to raise visibility and opportunities for women scientists and technologists. Li emigrated from China as a teenager, co-directs Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute, and co-founded World Labs. The prize will be presented by the King at St James's Palace.

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