Great seeing Professor Fei Fei Li speak this week at the Axios AI summit. It was neat hearing her speak about the need for and potential benefits of AI in all types of areas including health care.

For those who don’t know her, she changed the field of AI by organizing the first benchmark competition (Imagenet) and introducing standardized datasets.

ImageNet is an image database organized according to the WordNet hierarchy (currently only the nouns), in which each node of the hierarchy is depicted by hundreds and thousands of images. The project has been instrumental in advancing computer vision and deep learning research. The data is available for free to researchers for non-commercial use.

ImageNet (image-net.org)

Subsequently, various teams from different schools and corporates competed to see who built the better AI that would get a better score. Eventually, in one of the early competitions, a model called AlexNet stood head and shoulders appart from the competition.

The innovation was an architecture that relied heavily on GPUs and deep neural nets, wich is standard stuff these days. It was called a CNN (convolutional neural network).

Now, the AI field is rife with benchmarks and competitions. Consider whenever Arxiv publishes a paper (the “journal” where AI papers appear), there typically is a benchmark comparison. This way readers can see where the AI model is better or worse than existing models. That all started with Fei Fei Li. It’s not everyday you get to impact how a field is created.

You can read more about this panel on Axios AI Summit website.