Day 1: Kickoff! Computer Vision, Scavenger Hunt, and more!

As SAILORS returns for the second summer, the new campers are giddy with excitement. After grabbing breakfast and getting to know one another, the girls situate themselves in a lecture room in the Gates Computer Science building at Stanford University. Professor Fei-Fei Li, director of the SAILORS program and the AI Lab as a whole, warmly welcomes the campers to the summer program, imparting the grounds on which the idea of an all-girls, two-week research-intensive program came about just two years ago. Though Professor Li acknowledges the recent talk of the possibility of AI becoming the "terminator next door" that some critics of the field fear, that was exactly what swayed her, along with co-director Olga Russakovsky, to feel the desperate need of bringing more females into the field of AI. Because, as Prof. Li puts it, when we have women who gravitate AI towards humanity–women who are compassionate, who care about AI safety–the potential benefits from the societal impact far outweigh the prospect of AI coming to dominate the world.