‘Godmother of AI’ to speak at First Year Academic Convocation
Renowned computer scientist Fei-Fei Li, the so-called “Godmother of AI” whose groundbreaking work on human-centered artificial intelligence has made her a leading voice in the conversation about technology’s role in society, will be the featured speaker at Boston College’s First Year Academic Convocation on September 5 in Conte Forum.
Li, who served as a vice president at Google and chief scientist at Google Cloud, will offer both professional and personal insights on the opportunities and challenges of AI—the subject of her 2023 book The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI—to the BC Class of 2028.
Preceding Li’s talk will be the traditional First Flight Procession, which begins with the assembly of members of the new class on Linden Lane, where faculty, staff, and administrators challenge the students to follow the charge of St. Ignatius to “Set the world aflame.” The torchlit procession that follows—and which is repeated by the class on the day of its Commencement—winds through Gasson Hall, down the Higgins Stairs, and into Conte Forum.
“As we enter new territories with artificial intelligence, our incoming students are beginning one of their first major transitions.," said event organizers in BC's Office of First Year Experience. "Dr. Fei-Fei Li provides an excellent narrative linking together her journey of transformation with her work as a researcher, scholar, and professor.
“We hope our first-year and transfer students will be inspired by her personal and professional lived experiences as they transition into Boston College.”
Li is the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, and co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute. She directed Stanford’s AI Lab from 2013 to 2018— she worked at Google and Google Cloud during her sabbatical from Stanford—and has served as a board member or advisor in various public or private companies.
She has shared her expertise in testimony before the United States Congress, as a special advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations, and as a member of the California Future of Work Commission for the Governor of California, and the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Task Force for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the National Science Foundation.
“[W}e should recognize human intelligence is very, very complex. It’s emotional, it’s compassionate, it’s intentional, it has its own blind spots, it’s social. When we develop tomorrow’s AI, we should be inspired by this level of nuance instead of only recognizing the narrowness of intelligence.”
A native of Beijing who immigrated to the United States with her parents when she was 16, Li earned degrees from Princeton University and the California Institute of Technology. While at Caltech, she worked on the one-shot learning technique—which can make predictions based on minimal data and is important for computer vision and natural language processing—and became a key contributor to AI. She later conceptualized the ImageNet database, laying the foundation for generative AI.
In a 2023 interview, Li described The Worlds I See as “half memoir, half science.”
“[It] captures both the science part of AI as well as the journey of a scientist who is coming of age,” she said. “My background is, I guess, not that of a typical kid. So I do traverse different worlds physically, temporally. As a scientist who has been involved not only in the science of it but also in the social aspect of the science, I see the worlds in different dimensions, so it was very important that I made [the title] plural: The Worlds. Because I’m a computer-vision AI scientist, the worlds I see capture that very essence of seeing.”
Li said the framework for human-centered AI comprises three elements. “One is that it recognizes AI as part of a multidisciplinary field; it’s not just a niche computer science field. We use AI to do scientific discovery, we want to understand AI’s economic impact, we want to use AI to super-power education and learning. It’s deeply interdisciplinary. We want to make sure we study and forecast what’s coming.
“We also recognize that the most important use of a tool as powerful as AI is to augment humanity, not to replace it,” she explained. “When we think about this technology, we need to put human dignity, human well-being—human jobs—in the center of consideration.”
“As we enter new territories with artificial intelligence, our incoming students are beginning one of their first major transitions.. Dr. Fei-Fei Li provides an excellent narrative linking together her journey of transformation with her work as a researcher, scholar, and professor. We hope our first-year and transfer students will be inspired by her personal and professional lived experiences as they transition into Boston College.”
Understandably, such a large language model and its power creates great excitement, said Li, “but we should recognize human intelligence is very, very complex. It’s emotional, it’s compassionate, it’s intentional, it has its own blind spots, it’s social. When we develop tomorrow’s AI, we should be inspired by this level of nuance instead of only recognizing the narrowness of intelligence.”
Since 2004, each incoming Boston College first-year class has engaged in a reflective dialogue, “Conversations in the First Year,” about a common text as a means to offer insight on responding to life’s questions, and to find direction in each student’s personal journey—a shared experience embodying the richness of the Catholic intellectual tradition at Boston College. The author of that year’s text presents the convocation’s keynote address, which serves to broaden students’ perspectives on, and appreciation for, what they have read.