Fei-Fei Li, AI Pioneering Woman, Honored as Queen Elizabeth Prize Laureate

Professor Fei-Fei Li, a renowned expert in artificial intelligence (AI), has expressed pride in being the only woman among seven pioneers of AI being honored with the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. The King will present the award to Prof Li and six others, including Prof Yoshua Bengio, Dr Bill Dally, Dr Geoffrey Hinton, Prof John Hopfield, Nvidia founder Jensen Huang, and Meta's chief AI scientist Dr Yann LeCun, during a ceremony at St James's Palace. According to Prof Li, being the only woman among the honorees makes her "proud to be different." This sentiment reflects the growing recognition of the need for diversity and inclusion in the field of AI, which has historically been male-dominated. The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering is one of the most prestigious awards in the engineering field, and this year's recipients are being recognized for their contributions to the development of modern machine learning, a field that underpins the rapid advancement of AI. Prof Li's comments also highlight the significance of her own contributions to the field of AI. As the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL), she has played a key role in advancing the development of AI and its applications. Her work has focused on the intersection of AI and human-centered design, with a particular emphasis on the use of AI in education and healthcare. The seven honorees are being recognized for their pioneering work in machine learning, which has enabled the development of AI systems that can learn from data and improve their performance over time. This technology has far-reaching implications for society, from improving healthcare outcomes to enhancing the efficiency of industries such as finance and transportation. The Turing Award, often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Computing," was awarded to Dr Hinton, Prof Bengio, and Dr LeCun in 2018 for their work on deep learning, a key area of machine learning. Prof Li's recognition as the "godmother of AI" reflects her own contributions to the field, which have been widely recognized by the academic and industry communities. The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering is a testament to the significant impact that the honorees have had on the field of engineering and society as a whole. As AI continues to advance and become increasingly integrated into our daily lives, the work of these pioneers will only become more relevant and influential. The ceremony at St James's Palace will take place on [date], marking a significant milestone in the recognition of the contributions of these seven pioneers to the field of AI.