The data that transformed AI research--and possibly the world

In 2006, Fei-Fei Li started ruminating on an idea. Li, a newly-minted computer science professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, saw her colleagues across academia and the AI industry hammering away at the same concept: a better algorithm would make better decisions, regardless of the data. But she realized a limitation to this approach--the best algorithm wouldn't work well if the data it learned from didn't reflect the real world. Her solution: build a better dataset. "We decided we wanted to do something that was completely historically unprecedented," Li said, referring to a small team who would initially work with her.