Transcription
Hi there, welcome back to my channel. I'm Zine, a daytime data scientist and a free-time content creator. I talk about my life, my work, books that I read, and my channels. Speaking of the book, it's been a while since my last monthly book recommendations, that I think I might need to change the name into "Quoty Book Recommendations" instead. So today, I'm actually here to introduce a memoir that I have recently read that truly resonates with me. It's "The Words I See" by Dr. Fei-Fei Li.
As a pioneer in artificial intelligence, Dr. Li kick-started the Big Data era and brought AI and computer vision into the forefront and to the next level through ImageNet. Starting with her Congressional hearing experience in Washington D.C., where she testified before the House Committee of Science, Space, and Technology about the rising concerns of artificial intelligence in 2018, Dr. Li reflects on the journey that has brought her to the forefront of AI advancement. She shared her evolution from a physics-obsessed child in China to an AI pioneer advocating its responsible use. She opens up about her family's struggles after immigrating to the US, where they have faced significant hardship, from middle-class stability to poverty while caring for her mother's health. These obstacles often cast a shadow on her progress in AI. Despite all these challenges and hardships, she still found her North Star as a scientist, persistently overcoming obstacles to create groundbreaking innovations. Dr. Li's memoir not only captures her relentless pursuit of this vision but also her sincere reflections on the critical issues surrounding AI and its interactions with humanity. As a data scientist immersed in AI's latest practices and applications, and as a Chinese female immigrant navigating my own challenges, I find Dr. Li's journey profoundly inspiring. This book touches so many aspects of her life that echo my experiences as we are constantly looking for our positions in the world, and I can't wait to share and dive into more details with you. Specifically, I will talk about three of these aspects: being a scientist in AI, being a Chinese immigrant to the US, and being a woman in the tech field. So, let's dive right in and explore the captivating story of Dr. Fei-Fei Li's "The Words I See."
Throughout the book, Dr. Li's passion for science is palpable. She was raised by typical Asian parents who not only supported her unconditionally but also inspired her with their own curiosity and aspirations towards the world. Dr. Li recalls an incident that happened during her school years in China, where her teacher was worried that her extensive interest in reading science magazines and Western literature might affect her school performance. However, her mom firmly supported her interest, arguing against the notion of sidelining one's interests for the sake of discipline, a stance that profoundly influenced Dr. Li's path to science. After immigrating to the US, Dr. Li fully embraced her interest in science. She was constantly challenged and encouraged by her high school math teacher, who also became her first American friend and a lifelong mentor. After graduating from high school, she got accepted into Princeton and was introduced to computer science. She spent a summer in Berkeley's lab exploring vision neurons, which set a foundation for future work. Then, at graduate school, among so many choices that she had, she chose Stanford and surrounded herself with so many intelligent people. All her scientific training and all the role models that she found along her scientific path have helped her in finding her North Star, which is teaching machines to understand the human world's vision, what we now call computer vision.
The book is mostly focusing on the creation of ImageNet. ImageNet is a large dataset that is designed to help artificial intelligence with visual recognition. It contains millions of annotated images that are based on a hierarchy from WordNet, combining with deep learning algorithms. It has significantly advanced AI applications, ranging from social media photo tagging to autonomous driving systems. Like any fundamental breakthrough, creating ImageNet and establishing its credibility was never an easy journey. Dr. Li demonstrates her excellent skills in storytelling by detailing the development of ImageNet. She describes how she was inspired to enhance AI capabilities through gathering more data rather than just focusing on improving the algorithms, which kick-started the Big Data era. Dr. Li explored various methods to accumulate immense amounts of high-quality annotated image data following a specific hierarchy. In essence, she finally realized that hiring undergrads from Princeton was much more costly and less efficient than crowdsourcing globally. Even after the database was well-established, it only became popular and gained its credibility in performance after it was combined with neural network algorithms like CNN. Reading chapter 7 about the development phase of ImageNet is akin to reading a thriller. Even though we might already know the outcome of the thriller, the path to where the outcome is still very captivating and intriguing, with a lot of twists and turns.
As a data scientist myself, I recognize how fast-paced this world is. What's popular this year may not be next year's fast-mover anymore. Learning about the development and introduction of ImageNet and its superpowers, which occurred before I entered this field, has been very enlightening. It's a wonderful way to appreciate and honor the scientists dedicating themselves to advancing the field. Scientific breakthroughs may seem to happen overnight to the public. For example, all of a sudden, everyone is talking about ChatGPT. However, bringing such innovations to the forefront of the public and making a difference actually requires efforts from generations of dedicated scientists. Before I decided to get a PhD in economics, I had a chat with a PhD to get some advice, and what he said about the progress of scientific breakthroughs still lingers around my head. Science can be envisioned as a small circle that expands into a larger one through these breakthroughs. Each scientist might only push one point of the circle outward, and even this one point of the circle outward might take their entire lifetime. Eventually, with the collective push of many generations, the circle grows larger and larger. We can see this clearly in the development of ImageNet and the use of neural network algorithms. Initially, these complex algorithms were only used in digit recognition but failed to establish portability for other applications until they were combined with ImageNet.
Dr. Li has also shared detailed insights into how she switched her research focus to human-centered artificial intelligence and how she founded the nonprofit AI for All. Starting her career during the so-called AI winter, Dr. Li had witnessed the numerous challenges of teaching machines about intelligence. It wasn't until the launch of ImageNet and its innovative applications that AI began to captivate the world, leading to our development in applications like facial recognition, threat detection, self-driving cars, etc. While the capabilities of AI were widely embraced, concerns about fairness, security, privacy, and the potential for AI to perpetuate biases and undermine data security also gained public attention. Ultimately, how much can we trust AI? And how much privacy am I willing to sacrifice for AI applications? And am I even aware of the data leakage by AI? Moreover, AI has seemed to become a privilege for the wealthy, with well-funded tech companies leading the advancement of this field, just because they have the ability to invest in computing power and talent. Dr. Li demonstrated that by reflecting on her brave tenure as the Chief Scientist of AI at Google Cloud, where she observed her team was mostly composed of PhDs from top universities. You can even see this from the snack options offered in the office. She wrote, "The break rooms would start with more snacks, beverages, and professional-grade espresso hardware than anything I had ever seen at Stanford or Princeton." Rather than only enjoying being at the forefront of AI development, Dr. Li has consistently focused on the responsible use of AI and reflecting on the relationship between AI and humans. While AI eventually replaces humans, this concern draws more attention, especially with the introduction of the widely used ChatGPT. Just as this picture says, our intention to create AI might be: "AI can help me with repetitive work like chores and house chores, so I have more time to do creative work." But in fact, what we see right now is the opposite: that AI is doing our creative work, like what ChatGPT can do, and I might be replaced by it and stuck with house chores. Dr. Li has always believed that AI should be enhancing human capability, not competing with them. This belief has guided her efforts in promoting the responsible use of AI.
Constantly dealing with her mom's health condition, Dr. Li has been working on AI applications in hospital settings. One of the projects she has worked on involves building an application that monitors whether nurses have been washing their hands correctly before their medical procedures or before they make any contact with a patient. Regarding this project, she wrote, "I had learned a lot since this project began, lessons that unfolded slowly and often painfully. I've come to see my mother's struggle with her health in a different light and develop a new kind of empathy for the caregivers we had relied on for so many years. I had been horrified by the scope of human vulnerability in hospitals and inspired by the chance to do something about it. But the deepest lesson I had learned was the primacy of human dignity, a variable no dataset can account for and no algorithm can optimize. That old forum messiness reaching out to me from behind the weathered lines and worry eyes of the person I knew best and cared for the most."
So, this is all for this chapter talking about AI and being a scientist. But lastly, I wanted to conclude with what Dr. Li wrote in her reflections on her North Star, which is really inspiring. And you can see, we only reach higher scientific breakthroughs because of those dedicated scientists. I wonder, in fact, if the true value of the North Star as a metaphor wasn't just its ability to beckon, but the fact that its distance remains perpetually infinite. It can be pursued until the point of exhaustion, the object of a lifetime's obsession, but never be reached. It's a symbol of the scientist's most distinctive trait: a curiosity so relentless that it repels satisfaction like opposing magnets, forever a star in the night, a mirage in the distance, a road without end. This, I realized, was what AI was becoming for me. ImageNet was a turning point, and one certainly worth celebrating, but it wasn't the end of the journey. If anything, it was the start of an even grander one. And beyond that, I was now certain, more awaited than could fit in a career and even a life.
I have talked a lot about Dr. Li's professional work, but what resonates with me even more are her personal experiences. As a Chinese immigrant myself, trying to find my place in the US, I deeply relate to many of the struggles she described about fitting in. She shared an incident that happened in her ESL class. One of her classmates got beaten up at school because he accidentally made the slightest bit of physical contact with an American student. In the book, she wrote, "The reaction was merciless and immediate. The ESL boy was dragged through the exit and pushed to the floor of the hallway in a split second of fury. The flow of students instinctively forming and clearing around the commotion. Then, in yet another blur, I noticed the single aggressor has somehow multiplied. Two boys were now shouting insults while kicking reluctantly their target. He crawled up desperately trying to protect his head as blood flew from his nose and smeared across the floor." Witnessing this event, Dr. Li said, "I wanted to say something, even if it was nothing more than a single word plea for the violence to stop. But I noticed something strange: in the confusion of the moment, I didn't know which language to use." And after the event, she wrote, "We didn't see our friends for weeks after the beating. When he finally returned after what must have been an especially lonely convalescence, recovering from a broken nose and concussion, it was immediately clear that the boy we knew was gone. The cheer and humor that had defined him, apparent even through his broken English, had been replaced by a spirit so withdrawn he might as well have been a different person. As brutal as the assault has been in a moment—the pain, the humiliation, the sheer bodily violation of it all—it was this transformation that felt most dehumanizing: the theft of something in him." Violence might be a very unfortunate but less likely event that can happen to immigrants. Throughout the book, we see many common struggles that immigrants share, as leaving one's home country and starting a new life on the other side of the planet is never easy. Immigrating is different from studying abroad; it is a permanent decision to leave behind all the memories and established foundations and start from scratch. For Dr. Li and her parents, this meant transitioning from a middle-class lifestyle to poverty, living in a one-bedroom apartment for a family of three, mastering a new language, and assimilating to a culture. Whether they like it or not, they are forced to work in labor-intensive professions regardless of their previous status back home. The challenges of adapting to a new culture are profound, especially at a young age. A lot of times, Dr. Li considered giving up science and switching to majors like finance or medicine, which at that time might offer quicker financial stability. She was always forced to consider and make decisions between staying in academia and pursuing her dream as a scientist, or leaving academia and starting a job in the industry, which would ease the financial burden that her and her family were facing. Even though Dr. Li didn't make the decision herself to immigrate to the US, her parents were actually the ones who made the decision based on their aspirations. This decision has ultimately reshaped her life and provided her the opportunity to thrive. After finishing her lab work at Berkeley, she mentioned, "Part of me never left the dark of that Berkeley lab. The otherworldly sounds of its loudspeaker would ring on in my memory, each hiss and crackle hinting at a language science was just beginning to unravel. Even more than Princeton, it was the place that most fully demonstrated what my parents sought in coming to this country: the freedom to recognize a passion and to live it without compromise. Whatever my future held, this moment in the lab, our hearts pinging as we listened, was all the proof I needed to know they had made the right decision." Although she took the uneasy road, she wouldn't be who she is right now without all the struggles she conquered along the way. When she talked about who she identified herself as, she said, "Whether I would ever feel like a particular kind of person—Chinese American, maybe even an honorary Italian—I had long since shed the fear that I didn't belong. The people I have met along the way and the kindness they have shown me soar to that. The path of an immigrant hasn't been an easy one, but I am perpetually grateful for where it's taking me." As an immigrant, at one point, we might be able to make peace with the constant struggles to fit in and the constant search for a sense of home. Regarding this, in the end of the book, she wrote, "Looking back on my career, I believe that the experience of moving across the world left a mark on me that I am only now beginning to understand, one that continues to influence my research and thinking. It brings to mind the tensions that propelled my mother, the daughter of a politically disenfranchised coming-class family, gambled so much and journeyed so far. Now astonishingly leaving out her twin night years in a Palo Alto backyard. The life of a scientist, like the life of an immigrant, the life of an adventurer, is one in which home is never a clear concept. The best work always happens on the borders where ideas are forever chopped between coming and going, explored by strangers in strange lands, insiders and outsiders at the same time. But that's what makes us so powerful. It keeps our perspectives unique and frees us to challenge the status quo. Maybe we'll all find our home, no matter where we are in the world physically."
Another aspect of Dr. Li's experience that deeply resonates with me is her heart as a woman, especially in the male-dominated tech field. Dr. Li recounts how in China, her ability to excel in math and science was simply underestimated just because she's a woman. At the last year of her elementary school, she overheard her teacher telling all the boys in her class, after she dismissed all the girls, "Your performance as a group is unacceptable. As boys, you are biologically smarter than girls. Math and science are fundamental parts of that, and there is just no excuse for average exam scores to be lower than theirs. I'm deeply disappointed in you all today." Then, perhaps sensing that a note of encouragement was in order as well, the teacher is told to soften as the lecture concluded, "But I don't want you to lose hope. As you become teenagers, you'll find the girls among you that grow stupider, their potential will fit, and their scores will draw even still. I expect you all to work harder and live up to your potential as boys. Feeling behind the girls is unacceptable. Do you understand?" I never questioned this bias because I have heard similar sentiments among many sources: teachers, relatives, friends, even my own parents to an extent. I have almost internalized those ideas, nearly convincing myself as a girl, I am less capable than boys in the tech world, and that I'm just lucky to be one of the few girls in my cohort or on my work team. I always feared that one day they would discover my flaws and my inability to perform well. Although Dr. Li did not specifically elaborate on her struggles as a woman in her academic career in the US, I couldn't help but wonder whether her gender had played a role in the challenges that she faced as she tried to establish the credibility of ImageNet in the beginning. She notes in her book that when she was elected as the Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, she was the first woman to hold that title, although she was the seventh director. As a professor in the engineering department, the skewed gender ratio is so pronounced that a female student stands out to her just because of her gender.
Having experienced so many challenges, including the gender bias in AI, from its training process to its applications, and to the opportunity to learn AI, as AI becomes more and more privileged, Dr. Li was motivated to start and fund a nonprofit organization, AI for All. This organization offers AI-related courses to minority groups, preparing them for the future and potentially shielding them from some of the biases that she has faced. In a society that defines females as the second gender, it is easy to fall into the trap and be unconfident just because of our gender. After she overheard her teacher saying those comments to the boys in her class, she said, "As time passed, I began to realize that the incident wasn't the first sign that my family's inclusivity wasn't a given outside home. Most indications were subtle, if not intangible, like the sneaking suspicion that teachers drew out encouragement more readily to boys when it came to math and science. Others were overt. By the time I volunteered for first-grade soccer—not the boys' team, but the school team—and was told that girls simply weren't allowed to play. Shocked as I was by my teacher's words, I wasn't dissuaded. They only amplified the mandate of my upbringing to imagine something bigger than the world around me, no matter what might stand in my way. Now, I didn't just want to see further, but to reach further as well. It feels like math and science were boy's skin, so be it. But this wasn't soccer; they couldn't stop me from playing this time, and I was determined to win."
The thing for a man's life is return, as illustrated in Odyssey, while for women, her thing is to escape. The Chinese phrase "yìng guī" means returning home with glory, often describing men's returning to home after being successful in certain ways. But what about women? You've heard about it, probably because they have gone so far, and only when they've gone so far, they finally have the chance to find themselves and thrive. And once they find themselves, they escape; they wouldn't want to come back to the home that kept telling her that she is less capable than the boys. Besides this book, recently I have also been inspired by so many brilliant and sincere female creators in various fields. They can be directors, singers, writers, and etc. Despite the different formats of their creations, I have spotted some common traits from their creations: they consistently dig deep within themselves for inspiration, drawing on their own life experiences, relationships, and reflections on connections they have with the world. The moments that touch me the most were when the creators expose their deepest feelings. Some of those feelings are very vulnerable and even perceived as ugly. However, these creations always empower the audience with unfathomable force. It is true that we can be very vulnerable and be regarded as the second sex, burdened with invisible chains that society imposed on us. I hope my fellow women, that one day you will recognize these ridiculous chains, these absurd constraints that were imposed on us, and find the courage to break free from them.
Lastly, let me conclude with a speech made by Michelle Obama: "Yes, every other moment I feel self-doubt. Society intentionally does that to women and girls. It starts at a very early age with questions of values. We question how we look. There are people with power who want us to stay small. They want us to stay doubtful, and so our culture reinforces that. So the one thing I want young girls to understand is that those feelings are real. They are not crazy. They are indoctrinated in us all. We carry them around with us our early lives. We are constantly battling away those negative messages of being not enough."
This is such a long video. It almost took me over a month to prepare, to write the script, to shoot the video, and editing, and finally present it to you. I wanted, rather than rushing through to meet my video posting schedule, I wanted to take it slow this time and dig deeper into this captivating story, "The Words I See" by Dr. Fei-Fei Li, and I really enjoyed it by writing it out, finding out quotes from the book that resonate with me. And you can see, I have like so many texts. Whenever I'm reading something that really touched me in different ways, that's why I have different colors, and I really like sharing it with you. It's a process of organizing my thoughts and categorizing those feelings and letting it impact me. I hope I can share this impact to all of your audience as well. And if you have a tough time, please take a look at this book; it's really, really good. So, if you enjoyed this video, please leave a thumbs up or leave a comment on what other books you want to read with me in the future. So, until next time, stay curious, stay bold. See you soon. Bye. [Music]