When Fei-Fei Li arrived in Princeton in January 2007 as an assistant professor, she was assigned an office on the second floor of the computer science building. Her neighbor was Christiane Fellbaum. On the surface, Li and Fellbaum didn’t appear to have much in common. Li, a Princeton alumna from the Class of 1999, is a computer vision expert. Fellbaum, who earned her Ph.D. at the University in 1980, is a linguist. But they liked each other. “We talked often and became very friendly,” said Fellbaum.
Their friendship, as it turned out, would be fortuitous for the future of computing. Their meeting sparked an intellectual connection that inspired a computer vision database — a database that would lead to a paradigm shift in machine learning. Li and Fellbaum both had a fascination with the human mind’s ability to store and retrieve massive amounts of data. According to Li, they shared “a special interest in understanding — even mapping — the way a mind conceptualizes the world.”
“As humans, we’re naturally adept at recognizing things after even a single glimpse,” Li wrote in her book, “The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI.” Even very young children can recognize surface properties, objects, scenes, faces, and materials immediately and without touching them. To read the full story.