Too white, too male: scientist stakes out inclusive future for AI

Sometime around 1am on a warm night in June 2017, Fei-Fei Li was sitting in her pyjamas in a Washington, DC hotel room, practising a speech she would give in a few hours. Before going to bed, Li cut a full paragraph from her notes to be sure she could reach her most important points in the short time allotted. When she woke up, the five-foot three-inch expert in artificial intelligence put on boots and a black and navy knit dress, a departure from her frequent uniform of a T-shirt and jeans. Then she took an Uber to the Rayburn House Office Building, just south of the United States Capitol. Before entering the chambers of the US House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, she lifted her phone to snap a photo of the oversized wooden doors. Then she stepped inside the cavernous room and walked to the witness table. The hearing that morning, titled "Artificial Intelligence – With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility," included Timothy Persons, chief scientist of the Government Accountability Office, and Greg Brockman, co-founder and chief technology officer of the non-profit organisation OpenAI. But only Li, the sole woman at the table, could lay claim to a groundbreaking accomplishment in the field of AI. As the researcher who built ImageNet, a database that helps computers recognise images, she's one of a tiny group of scientists – a group perhaps small enough to fit around a kitchen table – who are responsible for AI's recent remarkable advances. That June, Li was serving as the chief artificial intelligence scientist at Google Cloud and was on leave from her position as director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab.