The worlds I see : curiosity, exploration, and discovery at the dawn of AI

First Title Value for Searching:

Personal Author:

Li, Fei Fei, 1976-

Edition:

First edition.

Physical Description:

322 pages ; 25 cm.

Summary:

"The moving memoir of a girl coming of age as an immigrant in America who finds her calling as a scientist at the forefront of the AI/ Machine Learning revolution. Fei-Fei Li is known to the world as the creator of ImageNet, a key catalyst of modern artificial intelligence (AI). But her career in science was improbable from the start. Moving from China's middle class to American poverty, her family navigated the hardships of immigrant life while struggling to care for an ailing mother at every step. However, Fei-Fei's adolescent knack for physics endured, sparking a journey that would lead her to computer science, experimental cognitive science, and, ultimately, the still-obscure world of AI. It positioned her to make a defining contribution to the breakthrough we now call the AI revolution and brought her face-to-face with the extraordinary possibilities-and the extraordinary dangers-of the technology she loves. Emotionally raw and intellectually uncompromising, The Worlds I See is a story of science in the first person, documenting one of the century's defining moments from the inside"--

Contents:

Pins and needles in D.C. -- Something to chase -- A narrowing gulf -- Discovering the mind -- First light -- The north star -- A hypothesis -- Experimentation -- What lies beyond everything? -- Deceptively simple -- No one's to control -- The next north star.

Subject Term:

Women computer scientists -- United States -- Biography.

Chinese American women -- Biography.

Artificial intelligence -- History.

Publication Info:

New York : Moment of Lift Books ; Flatiron Books, 2023.

Subject:

Women computer scientists -- United States -- Biography.

Chinese American women -- Biography.

Artificial intelligence -- History.

Li, Fei Fei, 1976-

Li, Feifei, 1976-

Li, Fei-Fei, 1976-

Women, Chinese American

AI (Artificial intelligence)

Artificial thinking

Electronic brains

Intellectronics

Intelligence, Artificial

Intelligent machines

Machine intelligence

Thinking, Artificial

SAILS ISBN:

9781250897930

Available:

Library	Shelf Number	Shelf Location	Status
Searching... Bridgewater Public Library	004.092 LI 2023	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... East Bridgewater Public Library	92 LI 2023	NEW NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Elizabeth Taber Library	004.092 LI	NEW NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Fall River Main	B L693	LOBBY	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Foxboro - Boyden Library	004.092 LI	NEW NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... New Bedford Francis J. Lawler Branch	B LI 2023	BIOGRAPHY	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Seekonk Public Library	920 LI	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Taunton Public Library	004.092 L612W	LOBBY	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S RECOMMENDED BOOKS ON AI * FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOKS OF 2023

From Dr. Fei-Fei Li, one of TIME 's 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL in AI, comes "a powerful plea for keeping humanity at the centre of our latest technological transformation" ( Financial Times ).

Wired called Dr. Fei-Fei Li "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."

Known to the world as the creator of ImageNet, a key catalyst of modern artificial intelligence, Dr. Li has spent more than two decades at the forefront of the field. But her career in science was improbable from the start. As immigrants, her family faced a difficult transition from China's middle class to American poverty. And their lives were made all the harder as they struggled to care for her ailing mother, who was working tirelessly to help them all gain a foothold in their new land.

Fei-Fei's adolescent knack for physics endured, however, and positioned her to make a crucial contribution to the breakthrough we now call AI, placing her at the center of a global transformation. Over the last decades, her work has brought her face-to-face with the extraordinary possibilities--and the extraordinary dangers--of the technology she loves.

The Worlds I See is a story of science in the first person, documenting one of the century's defining moments from the inside. It provides a riveting story of a scientist at work and a thrillingly clear explanation of what artificial intelligence actually is--and how it came to be. Emotionally raw and intellectually uncompromising, this book is a testament not only to the passion required for even the most technical scholarship but also to the curiosity forever at its heart.

Reviews (3)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Stanford University computer scientist Li debuts with an affecting memoir about immigrating to the U.S. and her cutting-edge work creating the ImageNet database that has proved critical to training visual recognition in artificial intelligence. She recounts living in poverty after moving with her parents from China to New Jersey when she was a teen in the early 1990s, but she excelled in school and eventually earned a PhD in computer science from the California Institute of Technology. The years after her graduation were filled with challenges, including her mother's declining health and her long-distance marriage (her husband was a fellow professor employed in a different state), but professionally she made a name for herself studying artificial intelligence. She recalls her Stanford University lab's race against Google to create software capable of describing images and, during her tenure as chief scientist of AI at Google Cloud while on sabbatical from Stanford, navigating the controversy that roiled the company after it accepted a Department of Defense contract for developing AI-powered facial recognition technology. Li's insider perspective sheds light on how Silicon Valley is handling the ethical questions posed by AI, as when she remembers feeling "awkward" trying to reconcile her Google colleagues' "good intentions" with her worry that AI could lead to "digital authoritarianism," and her story of overcoming adversity inspires. This brings new dimension and humanity to discussions of AI. (Nov.)

Kirkus Review

A leading AI scientist looks back at her decades of research and its personal impact. Li's path to the "epicenter" of artificial intelligence began with an insatiable curiosity and stoic defiance inherited from her parents, who came of age during China's Cultural Revolution. Moving to the U.S. with her family in 1992, when she was 15, the author was drawn into the digital revolution, especially the false starts and stalled progress of AI--a discipline that, Li clarifies, goes back further than today's headlines suggest. With the support and encouragement of mentors and collaborators, she attended Princeton, participated in breakthrough work at Caltech, and built a dazzling, boundary-crossing career merging physics with neuroscience and human evolution. Ultimately, she became the chief scientist of AI at Google Cloud and director of Stanford's storied AI Lab. Li attempts to translate the scientific details of some of her work, but many of these sections are murky and tedious for readers without a tech background. The author is strongest in her broader observations about the primacy of human sensory interpretation and the rise in the importance of data for AI, or the similarities between the immigrant experience and scientific discovery. The author chronicles how she helped shepherd AI from its most recent "winter," as well as the opening of the floodgates between academia and the tech firms of Silicon Valley. Li's personal and professional experience position her to illuminate the looming challenges in this accelerating trajectory, along with its ethical tensions and inherent tendency to promulgate a privileged perspective. Unfortunately, she short-circuits the power of her insights and calls for a human-centered approach to AI by relying on technical detail, professional jargon, and personal anecdotes, conveyed with a distance that muffles their impact. Li is a pioneer, but she misses an opportunity to meaningfully weigh in on a pressing current issue. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

In this timely memoir, Stanford University computer science professor Li, an AI scientist who is well known in both academic and tech circles, tells a story about stories. Patched together, these tales elucidate the twists and turns to one of this century's most coded narratives: AI's maturation in American society. Li's interdisciplinary perspective looks at the archives of computer and data science, her own family's immigration history, and how these two narratives coalesced into a cautiously optimistic vision of the American dream, just as Silicon Valley's AI explorations were magnified by ethical concerns, including those of surveillance. Encoded in all these stories is a sense of humanity--in all its messiness, failures, illnesses, and uncertainty--as Li continuously returns to her AI philosophy of prioritizing human needs. Li's humanistic approach to AI is also reflected in her memoir's accessible tone, which allows readers to easily grasp high-level scientific concepts. Readers looking for a portal into a science that is not often illuminated or connected back to the human experience may especially enjoy this memoir.

1 Pins and Needles in D.C.	1
2 Something to Chase	9
3 A Narrowing Gulf	31
4 Discovering the Mind	69
5 First Light	98
6 The North Star	116
7 A Hypothesis	147
8 Experimentation	180
9 What Lies Beyond Everything?	208
10 Deceptively Simple	241
11 No One's to Control	266
12 The Next North Star	301
Acknowledgments	319

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Bound With These Titles

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Summary

Summary

Reviews (3)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Kirkus Review

Booklist Review

Table of Contents