Summary MAKERS sits down with Fei-Fei Li, a tech rock star who stood up to the AI community to develop a project about machine learning she was sure would push the field further-and it did. In 2006, she launched the ImageNet project to teach machines how to "see" objects. "We got scathing reviews. I didn't spend too much time thinking 'should I do it or not' because I knew in my mind this will change how we think about machine learning." Today, her work is recognized as a key turning point in AI development. Li was born in Cheng Du, China, where cloudy skies were the norm. This sparked an interest in the power of nature that grew into a passion for understanding the world through STEM. "As I entered school, the sheer beauty of math and science attracted me." In 1992, 16-year-old Li and her family emigrated to the U.S., facing a world of change. "I pretty much had to learn English from scratch. I had to carry all these dictionaries to survive my day." Just two years later, she'd earned a near full-ride to Princeton University and went on to earn a Ph.D. from Caltech. Her goal is to ensure tomorrow's brave new world will have feminism built in. But right now women earn only less than 20% of the computer science degrees. Li sees this imbalance as a threat to how technology helps society and advocates for change. "We need to be mindful that human values define machine values. If our training data misses a big population of our world, that would have grave consequences."

• Biography