Heart of the Machine reports.
Today, The Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) announced on its official Twitter account that Christopher Manning is the new head of the lab, while the previous head, Fei-fei Li, is responsible for “human-centered AI initiatives.”
Readers of Stanford CS224n may be familiar with Manning, who introduced a lot of natural language processing methods and concepts in his open class. Readers of Stanford CS231n will be familiar with Fei-fei Li, who led the design of the computer vision course. These two open courses (2017) are essential resources for understanding the field of natural language processing and computer vision, and Christopher Manning, now focusing on NLP, is the new head of SAIL.
Heart of the Machine introduced Manning’s vision of the beauty of language, and with the popularity of pre-training methods such as BERT, there will be more developments in the NLP field. So Manning is going to lead the lab to do a lot more with AI, especially natural language processing. In addition, a tweet from THE Stanford ARTIFICIAL Intelligence Lab said That Li, as co-head of HAI, is driving the new program, focusing on AI research, education, policy and practices to benefit all humanity.
Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL)
SAIL, one of the world’s top artificial intelligence research institutions, was founded in 1962 by John McKinsey, the father of artificial intelligence and the inventor of Lisp language. The lab has experts in a variety of fields, including robotics, computer vision, machine learning, image processing, and natural language processing.
Manning and Fei-fei Li have made a lot of contributions to the laboratory, and SAIL has recently won a number of honors in the academic world, including IJCAI 2018 Computer and Ideas Award, and the Best paper award in several academic conferences. Including COLT 2018, ACL 2018, SGP 2018 and NIPS 2017. In addition, SAIL launched a new technology blog on The 18th of this month, featuring the latest research and thinking in the lab.
Blog homepage: https://ai.stanford.edu/blog/about/
In November 2017, SAIL and JD also released the SAIL-JD AI Research Initiative. They had already launched their first projects, including robotics, conversational systems, modeling scene recognition, knowledge mapping and applications.
Here are some of the most familiar:
Christopher Manning
Christopher Manning, the new head of SAIL, received three bachelor’s degrees (mathematics, computer science, and linguistics) from The Australian National University in 1989 and a PhD in linguistics from Stanford University in 1994.
After teaching at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Sydney, he returned to Stanford in 1999 to work in the Department of Computer Science and Linguistics, where he is a founding member and director of the Stanford NLP Group. After returning to Stanford, he stayed for 19 years.
Manning’s research goal is to realize the processing, understanding and generation of human language in an intelligent way. His research fields include tree RNN, emotion analysis, neural network-based dependency parsing, neural machine translation and deep language understanding, etc. He is a deep learning pioneer in the field of NLP. He is a Fellow of international Computer Society (ACM), International Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), International Society for Computational Languages (ACL) and other international authoritative academic organizations. He has won the Best paper Award of ACL, EMNLP, COLING, CHI and other international Summit conferences. He is the author of “Fundamentals of Statistical Natural Language Processing”, “Introduction to Information Retrieval” and other famous textbooks of natural language processing.
Personal homepage: https://nlp.stanford.edu/manning/
Li Feifei’s recent news
In June, rumors surfaced that Li was leaving Google. In September, it was confirmed that Li had returned to Stanford to teach as well as to serve as AI/ML consultant for Google Cloud. Her original position was taken by Andrew Moore, dean of CMU Computer School, who will leave his position at the end of this year to join Google full-time. Rumors outside although confirmed, but as a rare artificial intelligence Chinese female scientist, Li Feifei itself is quite a topic, about her return to Stanford after the action, we have to wait and see.
There is a saying that a new broom sweeps clean, and while Li may not be a “new broom” at Stanford, she has been gone for two years. So in October, just two months after returning to Stanford, Li lit her first fire by taking on the role of co-head of the Human-centered AI Initiative. The program is aggressive and has a strong cast, which currently includes: Rob Reich, Professor of Political Science, Stanford University; Nigam Shah, Associate Professor of Biomedical informatics and biomedical information Sciences, Stanford University; Londa Schiebinger, John L. Hinds Professor of History, Stanford University; and Professor of Computer Science and Linguistics, Stanford University Chris Manning and Euan A. Ashley, professor of cardiovascular medicine, genetics and biomedical data science at Stanford University.
In November, Li feifei made another move. Today, The Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) tweeted that Fei-Fei Li will no longer serve as head of SAIL, which will be assumed by Manning, while Fei-Fei Li will become co-head of the new project, “Human-centered AI Initiative”. As its name suggests, the human-centred AI Initiative aims to put people at the centre of artificial intelligence. It will work to support the breadth of interdisciplinary research and promote dialogue between academia, industry, government and the masses, namely a human-centered AI. It was founded on the premise that the rewards and risks of AI were equal, and that AI needed to be guided by someone responsible, and humanist. And Li Feifei is about to devote herself to this matter and is no longer responsible for SAIL. It reminds me of how Kai-fu Lee commented on her after she announced her “human-centered AI plan” : “Li Fei-fei is AI’s conscience.
What is the future of the Stanford AI Lab under Manning’s leadership? Let’s see!
