Fei-Fei Li: If We Want Machines to Think, We Need to Teach Them to See

It's 2025 (give or take), and the long-awaited Big One has hit the San Francisco Bay Area. In the frenetic aftermath, teams of specialized rescue workers begin tearing through piles of wreckage--searching for signs of life, administering care, and calling for backup. As Stanford University's leading AI scientist Fei-Fei Li imagines it, they're robots with the smarts to "see" through their immediate surroundings and respond to humans in need, saving the maximum number of lives they can. The enabling technology behind this scenario is one Li has thought about and researched deeply--and it's not too far off, she argues, if computers can master what is arguably humankind's most complicated cognitive ability: vision. Current research, led by Li and the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory she directs, has already gotten us partially there, thanks to a database of more than 15 million digital images built in 2009.