The 'godmother' of AI, Professor Fei-Fei Li, informed the BBC that being the one lady among the many seven pioneers of synthetic intelligence to be awarded the highest engineering award by King in the present day makes her “proud to be different”.
The King will current the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering to Professor Lee and 6 others throughout a ceremony at St James's Palace.
Joining him as honorees are Professor Yoshua Bengio, Dr. Bill Daly, Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, Professor John Hopfield, Nvidia Founder Jensen Huang and Dr. Yann LeCun, Meta's Chief AI Scientist.
He is being acknowledged for his contributions to the event of recent machine studying, a area that underlies the speedy progress of AI.
Dr. Hinton, Professor Bengio and Yann LeCun, at present Chief AI Scientist at Meta, have been widely known because the “Godfathers of AI” as they have been collectively awarded the 2018 Turing Award.
However, there is just one so-called “godmother” of AI and Professor Lee informed the BBC that she has grown to just accept this nickname.
“I wouldn't call myself the godmother of anything,” she stated.
She stated that when folks began calling her that a couple of years in the past, she needed to cease and acknowledge that if I rejected it, it could take away the chance for girls scientists and technologists to be acknowledged that method.
“Because men are too easily called godfathers or founding fathers.”
“For the sake of the young women I work with and the girls of future generations, I am now ready to accept this title,” she stated.
Born in China, Professor Li moved to the US as a young person and excelled in laptop science. She is co-director of the Stanford Computer Science Department and co-founder and CEO of World Labs.
It is his work on the ImageNet challenge that has enabled main advances in laptop imaginative and prescient for which he’s acknowledged.
He and his college students created huge picture recognition datasets on which a lot synthetic intelligence know-how is now constructed. This paved the way in which for laptop imaginative and prescient – determining how computer systems may 'see'.
The significance of that information set “opens the door to data-driven AI,” she says.
She thinks the following AI milestone will come when it is ready to work together with the world round it.
This capacity is “inherently important and native to animals and humans”, and if it may very well be unlocked in AI, it may “superpower” people in some ways, together with “creativity, robotic learning, design, and architecture”.
This would be the first time that every one seven award winners will come collectively in individual.
The three “godfathers” have publicly expressed opposing views on how harmful AI may be.
Dr. Hinton has repeatedly expressed Serious considerations concerning the potential for AI to pose an “extinction level threat”. But Professor LeCun, who additionally works at Meta, wrote this Apocalyptic warnings have been exaggerated,
Professor Lee says she takes a extra “pragmatic approach” and says disagreement amongst scientists is “healthy”.
“We're also used to disagreement, and I think that's healthy. A topic as deep and impactful as AI requires a lot of healthy debate and public discussion.
“I think that in the case of AI, both extremes of rhetoric concern me… I have always advocated for a more science-based, practical method in communicating and educating the public.
“So, yes, I would like to see our communication of AI be more measured and based on facts and science rather than excessive rhetoric”.
The Queen Elizabeth Award is offered yearly to engineers who’re answerable for groundbreaking improvements that profit humanity on a worldwide scale. Previous recipients embrace Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web.
Lord Vallance, Chairman of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation, stated the winners “represent the very best of engineering,” including that their work “shows how engineering can sustain our planet and transform the way we live and learn.”
Additional reporting by Philippa Wynne
With inputs from BBC