Fei-Fei Li: One Immigrant's American Dream

welcome back everyone we're gonna get started with our next session now where I'll be speaking with a Stanford professor Fei Fei li Fei Fei is a professor of computer science here at Stanford and she's also the director of Stanford's artificial intelligence lab and Stanford's vision lab she is currently on leave from Stanford and is working as the chief scientist of both artificial intelligence and machine learning at Google cloud hope I get all this right long before all of that success Fei Fei was a 16 year old new American moving here to the US she left China she and her family left China from Parsippany New Jersey where there was a well-established Chinese immigrant community since Fei Fei came to the u.s. in 1992 90 to about around let's say you know better the number of Chinese immigrants in the US has more than quadrupled from about a half-million to almost 2.2 million but it was there in Parsippany New Jersey that Feifei strengthened her English skills and worked at Chinese restaurants and as a house cleaner to help support her family economically she turned out to be a phenomenal student and won a scholarship to Princeton where she studied physics she managed during that time to help her parents to buy a dry-cleaning business and she spent many of her weekends during her time at Princeton going back to precipitate working in the family business from Princeton she went on to earn her master's and PhD in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology where she was supported by a Paul and Daisy Soros fellowship for new Americans during her time at Caltech she began focusing on artificial intelligence and machine learning and after wrapping up at Caltech she done served as on the Faculty of the University of Illinois at urbana-champaign and then at Princeton back at Princeton and she came to Stanford in 2009 as an assistant professor and was promoted to a tenured position in 2012 her research areas are in machine learning computer vision and cognitive and computational neuroscience with an emphasis on the analysis of big data she has published more than 100 scientific articles and leading journals and her work has been supported by many many outlets including the National Science Foundation Microsoft the sloan Foundation and many others and I really honestly could spend the entire session listening all off a phase many accomplishments so I won't do that because I wouldn't like to here we I know we don't like to hear from her I do want to flag her recent selection as a great immigrant by the Carnegie Corporation and I am you know last in our last session Ron talked about you know this data pulling together data from all these different sources to try to get a sense of the big picture what's happened with immigrants in the u.s. over a long time period but zoomed in on a couple of specific immigrant experiences that you know to understand those anecdotes helps us understand the big picture much more and I think Feifei is going to help us on that front so I am absolutely thrilled to have my colleague and friend Ave faily with us here today please join us in welcoming her here err side chat sort of I guess there's no fire but fireside chat and so I'm gonna ask her some questions but I'm gonna gonna open it up to the audience here and there so please don't be shy in terms of asking questions or else I can I don't want to dominate the whole session hey thanks so much for making time with us you mark yeah it is it's exciting this is my first time ever sharing the stage with someone who also has two degrees in electrical engineering so through electrical engineering degree so I'm very very extra' excited for that reason but perhaps I mean this is obviously difficult so go into everything but maybe you can just tell us a bit about your about your life in China before coming to the u.s. when you were 16 and what you were like as a kid and teenager and yeah most comfortable family parents and what preceded your move sure well first of all thank you Mark for inviting me here I'm a technologist so you know I'm not a policy maker so it's a very fun opportunity to be among so many people thinking about policy I guess I'm here as your guinea pig so so life in China so I was mostly my memory of China as 80s and early 90s which is a really different China from today's China that many of you are more familiar with it's a it was a much simpler and a bit closed society even though the open door policy did got him initiated around the time I was born and I was in a sari I was born in Beijing but I grew up in a small city cotton do with you know 12 million people and the capital of southwest China Chandu is very famous for two things not its people but for spicy food and the Bears and I was in a typical middle-class family my parents were educated even though you know that generation they've got a lot of stories with Cultural Revolution for sure and I I grew up in them mostly City today's gender is very cosmopolitan I wouldn't call the chandu in the 80s cosmopolitan but it was a big city and and I was I was a good student I guess like many of us but I would say that one thing I feel very very lucky looking back at my life is that my parents gave me a lot of early childhood intellectual freedom and that's a little bit different from what my friends have experienced especially as a girl I was very much into physics I was very much into space and and didn't really understand why girls are told that they suck at math disagree with the teacher when she said you know I'm girls I'm not supposed to do this not supposed to do that but back at home my local small family gave me the kind of freedom that I recognized today is really the foundation of my intellectual growth so so that was my life okay great when you look back on yourself you're you and your family when you were sort of 10 12 14 is there something about your family and you compare your family with others in your orbit at that time is there something about your family that made it more likely that they would emigrate that they would books I remember you know life in China in eighties whether your middle-class or not was very very simple everybody doesn't have too much materials I remember when I was an early thing I really longed for eating meat because that was like rare so so it's not like today that's not what we long for so there isn't much luxury nobody has car I didn't get into a car I mean there were buses but there's nobody on the car nobody knows own telephones for a long time I don't think my family ever had a telephone by the time I moved out of China there's no running hot water you know but my own family had lots of books and my mom is especially into world literature like I grew up I did tell this story to some of my friends when I was like 7 or 8 my mom just took away my children's book and filled my shelf with like Dickens Bronte is Shakespeare 7 or 8 yet Dostoyevsky Jane Eyre was my first real book so I think it just grew up with a little bit of that world culture around me because of that so maybe that was a a seed right do you did you know at the time or have you learned in the year sense what was the thing that catalyzed the actual move so there you are in China and takes a lot of work to get up and move I mean takes a lot of work to move a mile away to remove all this distance so what was the yeah so um a couple of things first of all my when my parents were discussing that I was around very early tea it took a few years so it's not like I was much of the decisions so a very very typical story there was some kind of relative right lega one catalyst this in fact it's a distant relative but it's a relative in New Jersey so that was a known fact that was kind of a link right right to New Jersey and also I think the couple of generations my parents generation and my grandparents generation in China they've been on the move quite a bit meaning of them because of the Wars is like my grandparents generation a lot of Chinese friends we share the story of our grandparents were moving from coastal to inner China because of the civil war the world war two so I think this concept of being on the move is not foreign yeah to those generations right so here you you arrive in the US and you tell us a bit about what that was like youyou you arrive and you're new I don't know did you arrive in August like ready for the new school year in the middle of the year I arrived in the middle of a school year like me or something and that's great yes and I remembered for sipping a new jersey the first thing I remember is there was running hot water I was like wow I was in heaven Chandu is a weird city in China it's it's actually cold in the winter but it doesn't have heat heating system like the winters were freezing so I didn't like that so coming to the US with hot water and heating that was nice and but it's very very different oh it's the first time I experienced my family had a car even though my dad bought a very very old used car but it's like wow we have a car that was foreign concept to me I didn't speak English much at all I was sent to pursue penny High School which is a public high school it was so different its opposite to Chinese schools because in Chinese school the kids are in one classroom the teachers come and teach you and in in America I know you guys all know that but it was shocking to me that I have to find my classrooms and there's like it's like a maze without speaking English in the in a big building or multiple buildings looking for a classroom was like that was shocking and the books are so heavy every page I had like 100 words I don't know so I was carrying an English dictionary like the snick Chinese English Dictionary cos I don't know how to survive that and and the students are weird I thought because in China I'm sure they're students from China well we were in starting elementary school to to to middle school high school you're very obedient to the teacher you're very like the hierarchy of authorities so clear we listen to the teacher and we do whatever the teacher tells us here I remember one of the first gym class there was this she's fairly a teacher she she was running around putting away the gym tools and the students were just like chatting and I started helping her and she said I don't need your help it feels like her job and then I was like wow this is weird were not helping teacher and then this classmate told me of course is her job my parents pay tax I was so shocked it's like opposite to what I knew and when you were there were there other people who had emigrated from China in your school who could help you sort of make transition so there was a ESL class English as second language I was immediately put into ESL classes and there so you see principally had a Chinese community actually it wasn't that big it was our ESL class had I think I was the only to one of the only two Chinese kids there were like Russian Yugoslavia Mexican I think Vietnamese Korean like it was a healthy mixture of immigrant kids not predominantly Chinese at all and so there was but perspective being a in Britain tongue had that system to help kids who didn't speak English and you spent sort of all day in the ESL classes or at the beginning I spend all day because I didn't understand a thing in other classes they only put me math class that's normal and I remember that I didn't understand a thing what the teacher says and then we'll get exams and the two types of question the questions with lots of words I was skip and the questions with lots of equations and numbers I'll do and then I'll get perfect steward to classes I get 50% I test that was my first few months and would you say when you looked around at your fellow students in terms of did you have a sense of the average amount of time they were spending on their homework versus you I have no idea then which speaks of another weird thing for me in American culture is the popular kids are the sport players right because in China the popular kids are the good students right and here's like the opposite the good students are not popular it's I have no idea how much time they spend our homeworks anyone with high schoolers here I can probably yeah give another give an estimate on that play sports that I place I did some sports but not really I wasn't very good kinda live vicariously through my kids now anyway so so you obviously did some things quite right while you were there because you arrived in tenth grade and you ended up going to Princeton pretty shortly after that how did Princeton get on your radar screen how did like was it yeah you know that's a that's pretty amazing for you to arrive not understand anything and then a couple years later you're at I the principal momma made a mistake because um the school I knew I was going to was Morris County College I don't know if anybody come from New Jersey no Morris County College is the 2-year Community College that's free and that's what I knew I would go to and and we didn't do it in college tore my family didn't have money and I didn't know there's such a thing as college tour and my dad did you dirt Princeton was close enough to precipitates in like an hour and half of Drive that we did pass by there once and I didn't know Princeton but I knew I instead I my dad because I loved physics my dad's Aoi Stein used to be here I'm like oh that's nice maybe I should try go so the school counselor did say in the library there's like this thick book called college entrance or something Kaplan Kaplan or something like that so I read that thing and learned about the process so I remember I applied to four schools Morris County College Rutgers New Jersey State University Princeton and MIT so cuz I was a stem student right but I feel I was super lucky as to things were lucky one is the teachers in person pretty high school particularly my math teacher Bob Sabella I still keep a very close relationship with his family I'm part of the family now even though he deceased but we continue to be family friends he really went out of the way to like I ran out of math class so he created math class for me alone during his lunch break and he became like my American uncle because I didn't know the culture I didn't know the school I clearly didn't have too many friends and he kind of protected me guided me even during college he would help me to move in and out of dorms and like when I got married his family came to Italy to our wedding so like that mentorship turning to friendship was I think the most critical part of my high school experience that played a huge role in my in my transitioning from high school to college I didn't have a high SAT score at all that's why I said I made a mistake because I did get good math score like 800 but verbal I didn't know there were classes to take so I just did what I could do the best and it was kind of bad right but there was tofu for those students like me so I took TOEFL I guess I was okay with TOEFL but I really didn't think I had amazing scores so I don't know how I got in a they write but they're not looking to necessarily we know here at Stanford all double 800 okay yeah I would have no chance for her and so maybe you can tell us a bit by the time you arrived at Princeton you had been in the country more than two years or three years okay and so you can tell us a little bit about what that experience was like by then did you feel like you've okay you kind of understood how things went here or was that a bit of an adjustment to Princeton is pretty different probably from your high school so honestly I don't know how much of my experience is typical of immigrations students and kids so first of all like you said because of the financial pressure and all that you know there's a joke that every Stanford computer science professor have to have a start-up to to get tenure my startup was my dry cleaner shop so I did that when I was 18 or 19 so around the time I I was entering Princeton our family borrowed the money from friends including my high school math teacher who lent us money and we got a tiny little precipitate dry cleaner shop and I became the CEO of the dry cleaner shop and because that by that time I could speak English my parents couldn't and so I was running the dry cleaner shop from Friday afternoon to sometime Monday morning sometimes Sunday evening I would be spending time in the dry cleaner shop so I lived a life and then I also worked in the library a little bit that is not a typical Princeton student life I didn't go to any eating club if you guys know what eating club is I didn't go to I I wasn't part of any sports or anything I was just busy trying to run my dry cleaner shop during weekends and go to classes during the week weekdays so from that point of view I didn't have a typical college experience I you know will prevented me from getting into trouble I guess but but in the meantime Princeton was really what I really love the intellectual environment was what I kind of it's just so natural to me like like I said I grew up in a very intellectually curious and driven family and environment so surrounding myself with scholars and scholarship and research opportunities was really amazing so that I feel like I feel so indebted to this system that would take an immigrant kid who has nothing no connection no money no understanding of this culture much and give her all the opportunities that I couldn't have dreamed of and so that part of Princeton was just amazing not the social part I didn't know oh you didn't close right yeah so I read and maybe maybe it's wrong but that after Princeton you went to Tibet to study at the Met in medicine so what was what was that was that what you thought your path was gonna be or sort of I'm gonna do this for a year and and and can you talk a bit about that yeah that was weird a lot of people asked for people so okay so a little bit of context I majored in prints the physics at Princeton if you are a physics student or physics researcher you know you're driven by the most fundamental questions of the universe where is the universe come from where did life come from these are the questions that really really excites me even to this day so around the time and I had some research experience at Princeton that I knew that the love of my life is a scientific pursuit the career as a researcher and scientist and and so before I went to Tibet or anything at the end of the college it was it was boom it's like all my friends get offers from Wall Street including myself but I actually knew I wanted to do PhD so I applied to MIT Caltech Stanford luckily got into all of them and chose the warmest place I yeah like you can see my running theme I'm afraid of cold so and then that around that time I developed an intense interesting scientific philosophy and despite my my cultural heritage I'm I brought up as a Western scientist my entire intellectual heritage or philosophical system is in the Western science philosophical system that is stemmed from the pythagorean's of the Greek time and and all that but I started to be very curious about a alternative alternative scientific methodology and that brought me to this intellectual interest in a non Western scientific methodology and there isn't much of a non Western science and engineering to be honest if you look at the ancient culture like Chinese Indians what the Indian culture has tremendous math and all that but medicine was the scientific lineage in the eastern world that is built upon a entirely different philosophical system and methodology system that I became very interested in so it was a deliberate decision that as a student of Western science I want to study and and learn about an Eastern scientific philosophy so I chose medicine I had some choices between Chinese medicine versus Tibetan medicine and I also was intensely curious about culture history and Buddhist religion and the interplay between religion and science so I chose Tibet and I was very lucky Princeton had a very special fellowship called Martindale fellowship Martindale fellowship was awarded every year it still is one graduating senior who has to design and carry out his or her own research project by him or herself it's kind of the anti Fulbright or you know you cannot be officially affiliated with any institutionalized program you have to be like kind of Indiana Jones and do-it-yourself and and I applied and designed a research agenda and luckily I got selected and so I spend a year plus in Tibet studying Tibetan medicine and also doing research in Tibetan medicine so that was what got me to Tibet if you're saying then you came from Tibet you spent about a year yeah you're there and then on to Caltech yes where I believe right before you got this fellowship Soros fellowship is that right and that helped assist you yeah I'm curious too you talked a little bit about financial responsibility with your parents was that a tricky thing to be 2,500 miles away with them still doing the yeah or was it clear that this was a by that time they were well along so so there are two piece I'll talk about just sorting out my parents and then I'll talk about Soros fellowship which deserves some credit especially our knowledge acknowledge me in this audience so with my parents I've always been remotely after college running the dry cleaner shop if you do have business you know you do a lot of customer relation insurance police department whatever I could do all that by phone the day-to-day cashier and ironing claiming my parents plus someone another immigrant actually how helped to do so I was always remotely I was a remote CEO my job so we sorted that out and to tell your parents I mean that yeah they were kind of your employees yes I would love that some day I talk to her you're already her employees and and also if you're a PhD student you get a stipend and I can live very frugally so I send a lot of money back to return our debts I know that so that was easy so source fellowship so I graduated Princeton 1999 and source of a fellowship at that time was 2 year old so in 1998 Paul and Daisy Soros inaugurated this visionary fellowship for children of new Americans or to new Americans themselves so if you have one parent that is a green card holder or naturalized citizen or you yourself is a green card holder or naturalized citizen you're qualified for this fellowship and this fellowship supports three years of full scholarship to aiming advanced degree like PhD MD MBA I think I are sore school here you know audience so and and JD and and they support any of that and their criteria is to select the future leaders of whatever discipline and they are very very it's a very well run a well thought of fellowship it's to this day I think it's a very unique one in the country and they stand for the the as a walk happiness of of of immigrant kids I know for a fact that they supported a lot of daca kids yeah and but that time I was the second class so it's really another 18-year years and that was that was very important for me not only it supported me financially but they put me in touch with a group of students who have very similar background in fact I think some of them will have such inspiring story I didn't think I deserved the fellowship some of them came from refugee boats some of them had to climb mountains to his escape Afghanistan some of them you know like um and meaning of these Soros fellows are either Rhodes Scholars Marshall scholars they are really amazing students like the last Obama administration Surgeon General was a Soros fellow and at Stanford we have three professors who are Soros fellows and we've got a lot of that is a fellowship that really has committed in supporting new immigrant children it's great you know what point in this road moved here 92 ish what point in the road did you become a naturalized citizen and can you talk a little bit about the process and was it a Sisyphean task doing or was it pretty pretty straightforward and smooth I have to say that I could have been naturalized citizen a lot earlier but I became one when I was a Princeton professor so that was like 2008-2009 I think a lot of that is out of laziness because applying for citizenship you have to fill out a lot of forms right right you have to study your Congress story yes history I'm okay but the names of people in your district it was pretty natural for me um and I have to say ever very silly personal reason is that I got married to a Italian and that means half of my family is in Italy if you ever hope Chinese passport I want to apply for European visa Schengen visa it's just painful like every trip is just so much pain to apply for that visa right I just got sick of it so it was even more paperwork to do that exactly and it's every time and I need to visit my family did it make a difference after you became a citizen in any way yeah I don't have to apply for Schengen visa okay well other than that but on any other dimension of your life that it matter in some way um I don't know actually that's a good question I I mean of course I have my responsibility to vote and know that I'm a scientist scientific community is extremely global and open so from that point of view it's the day-to-day work is not hugely different I have to say right okay so I'm gonna ask another question or two and then I'm gonna open it up and it would be great if a student kick things off with the questioning but it doesn't have to be that doesn't have to be so if I understand right you go to Italy some anti-china some and do you still have family there and do you you know talk with them about the experience some of them they think about moving to the u.s. hi I'm curious about so yeah I have so my husband he's he's also Stanford professor in AI he's genuinely Italian the sense that his parents are showing Italy he was educated in Italy he came here from Glasgow that's where we met so our family in Italy Naples Italy is quintessential Italian family and it's a very different world from here so my personal family my parents are here but my um sigh my grandma passed away my grandparents passed away a couple of years ago but up to a couple of years ago I frequently visited my grandparents I was very close to them I have cousins and friends we have collaborators now um being the chinese-american I think for those of you who have roots and family in China I think it's been a fascinating several decades because the pace of change in that part of the world this is way above average like looking at Italy's change China change there's a bit of us pace difference and so it's fascinating to be someone who is cross-cultural to experience the differences to share the experiences also being a PhD advisor I've got a lot of students who are from China and I also see the differences as the years pass the the the kind of background and experiences the students bring so so it is quite fascinating and so I know so we're here I know you said at the outset you're a technologist and not a policy maker we are at the Stanford Institute or Economic Policy Research so I just want to wonder if there's anything so you're you're in Silicon Valley you travel around the world from a policy standpoint that you think you know the US generally ought to be considering as a technologist here in Silicon Valley where we have such a high immigrant population lots on that okay so I'll give me a story because I knew mark is gonna ask me some tough questions so I was just I was just with my kid in the California Academy of Science Museum this past weekend and they have an exhibition on origin of human population the African exhibition and starts with Lucy and my son is six year old there's a nice display it's interactive when you click on different timeline back from a hundred thousand years ago all the way to now it shows you the migration pattern of human population and my son was just enjoying the clicking and for like long time in human humanity's history it was just a lot of movement within Africa and then around I don't know 40 thousand years ago I could be wrong you start see the arrows going to Europe and Middle East and and going to Asia and all that and I really dawned on me who is not an immigrant like the whole DNA of human as a species like forget about nationality just as a species that we are on the move we're on the moving seek of different things and that really is who we are and and so so from that point of view I definitely as an immigrant myself I'm so grateful of all the opportunities I have back home here support you know mr. Bob Sabella who is a white American who supported a Chinese kid who didn't speak English in high school and Princeton for some reason admitted me who had and then had to give me scholarship because I couldn't pay you know and and all that and now as a technologist and a professor at Stanford my entire career is beautify students worldwide and you know every single paper I guarantee even if you take my name out of it there there's somebody in the author list who's who was not born in America so like this is how we advance this field this is how thankful I am to this to this openness of exchange of talents and background and I have to say in the past few years I'm experiencing pain with my students I had Iranian students freaking out when the travel ban happened I have I mean this is kind of insane whirring the most AI heated time my students were a student and postdocs cannot stay in this country to continue their career because of immigration visa issue and are considering Canada and Australia and I have students who I try to recruit from elsewhere other countries who say I'm not coming here because I don't know if I'm welcome where I worry about my visa after after on the study here so that pain I'm experiencing with my students or potential students and that has increased in the past few years okay so with that let's open it up for questions from the audience or I can you but anyone out here who would like to send a question for professor already hit wherever here say something about the cultural revolutions impact on your family especially and maybe on you only ten I mean a little more than a decade so I was born right after cultural revolution so I myself don't have an impact I don't have any um memory or of course you know if you read any literature document from Cultural Revolution you will know that there are people who have been traumatized and you know women and I think I think for some reason I really don't know what it is detail my mom was not allowed to go to college even though she was a phenomenal student so that was a very personal you know story that I knew that was a impact by the by the time okay additional questions right over here thanks so much for sharing some of your personal story with us I was curious was sort of related to marks last question if you if there were sort of like three questions that you would like the policy community to be focused on in terms of the potential impact of a eye on society obviously in your recent op-ed you focus on the issue sort of potential for labor displacement I'm wondering what the other top three issues that you would want the policy community to be grappling with for a I'm not immigration okay so one thing is investment in basic science research I really worry about this because I think that this is the time we should invest in much more in basic science research there is a lot of resources going into private industry in terms of AI technology development and this is all wonderful but AI as a discipline is very nascent there are so many things Mike and I talk a lot about this there's so many things we haven't figured out both in the technology as a science itself as well as the social human impact of AI and we need to mobilize more researchers students in the academic wear world to do research and education because this is the world that's open that's transparent that add to the fairness to the diversity and wing policy-wise we need that kind of increase NSF budget has an increase for many years and the percentage is tiny well these things don't worry me you're related to that maybe I can just jump in for a second can you tell audience a bit about this AI for all initiative that I believe again it's Jenson Wang and others are supporting and what the rationale is for that and so um so let me just say briefly AI for or is a nonprofit organization I funded co-founded to increase inclusion and diversity education in AI education and research and so about four or five years ago I woke up with a realization that there are two crises in my professional like world and they seem to be disconnected one crisis is the AI crisis of terminators coming next door that you know AI is gonna go so bad and and take over humanity in whatever horrible ways Hollywood can think of and another crisis and that's me tell me more more real I'm not dismissing that crisis because people worried about the future yeah then there's another crisis is this diversity crisis like the number of women and underrepresented minority on technologists at Stanford in Silicon Valley worldwide is just abysmal and in computing this number is going down now going up and if you'd looked at the trajectory of the career the attrition rate is so low that for many many years I was the only woman faculty ai faculty in the Stanford Ella now we have four of us I'm very happy but anyway so that was a crisis and I start thinking you know what there might be a connection between these two because I want to do something to fix some of these problems as much as I can and that connection is how we are educating students tomorrow's leaders about AI in Silicon Valley there is a quarter of geekiness like everything about tech is cool is men with hoody is you know it's that geeky talk that excites children about tech which is fine I think that shouldn't legitimately continue to excite some of the children but not oh you know a lot of students especially students with a different background with a different walk of life tends to be inspired by a human mission of technology when the technology makes a difference when the technology saves lives when the technology protects environment and preserve energy and um that's where I start to linking if our technology is more human mission we would have less likelihood of terminators coming but if it's if it's educating a human mission way we would have more technologists who are who are of that kind of frame of mind will excite more students of all walks of life to participate in this technology and if we have more of them our technology will be more human mission and that become a positive feedback loop once I thought about that I share that idea with at that time she was my student but now she's a professor oh girl rossakoff ski and we're very excited with we said okay let's let's start running a small experiment program at Stanford cost effort AI lab outreach summer sailors that will invite high schoolers to come to campus to stay with us to two to three weeks study AI in rigorous ways we will expose them to the human mission of a I like using natural language processing for disaster relief using computer vision technology for hospital assistive technology using self-driving car technology for aging Society so that is the program we designed we ran that for a couple of years and became so successful that we thought okay let's scale it up we want to invite more people to participate in this so last year with the seed grant of Melinda Gates and Jensen and Lori Huang Foundation we found it AI for all as a nonprofit organization that focuses on creating campus wise summer camps for students of all walks of life in high school to learn about AI so 2018 we have six campuses for example Berkeley where we're facing low-income family students lots of immigrant kids there and Princeton were facing racial minority students at CMU we are facing facing a rural community students in Boston University were opening two girls Simon Fraser University also rural community as well as girls so we we localized and and and and work with the local university to inspire their local community of students to come and learn about AI and the human centered way of studying and researching AI that's great additional questions here from the audience okay while people are out we got one right here so it's actually continuing on the AI conversation but linking it to immigration do you think that with increasing what with increasing automation that there's going to be less need for low-skilled immigrants pacifically same things like agriculture yeah so um this is where it's stretching my area of expertise and I would rely on mark as well so um you know McKinsey has has issued a report last year or something about a eyes impact on labor and jobs and and you know it's estimated that 50% of the jobs will have been impacted by AI and a lot of a lot of the potential automation area is repetitive work that might not take you know extremely high skill to do so I think the bottom line is technology will disruptive technology throughout human civilization will have impact in jobs and labor market humanity has experienced that multiple industrial revolutions and and that pattern dates back you know even in previous times so with AI as such a powerful powerful technology I I think there's no doubt you know have an impacting jobs labor market this is why I mean mark and I work hand in hand at Stanford to advocate for more studies and research and policy research and and thinking on how we prepare for that it's not a simple story is that jobs will be taken away it's much more nuanced than that but we need to do more research and study some good economists so on that note do you think if if we think of immigration policies on the continuum tighter to looser as they are tighter is it fair to say that in your area because AI is this area of where innovation is very important do you think that as u.s. immigration policy somewhat tighter the sort of proportion of AI work that happens here in the US will be lower proportion of AI label high and RMD worried right do you think that it is so again I I don't have data to speak at that statistical skills you've got this anecdotes about I just see that Canada is having an extremely progressive and aggressive agenda in AI and I actually am helping Canada to advise some of their basic science research in yeah and you see their Institute's their talent attraction programs a lot of people are moving to Canada my students some of my students like I said are excited by their career prospect in Canada and I do wonder right like if our Stanford top talent AI students cannot stay in the US right Andy but there your sense from talking with people is to the extent that they can't Canada is as on their radar screen as China or which which of those two well it does depend on the the background of our students right China's still a society that you thrive the best if you speak Chinese whereas Canada if you already speak English it's easier to write go there if you don't speak Chinese so so that I think it's a little orange and apple to compare but but again when I came here in the 90s like there's no other country like us in the world for the best students like this is a mecca like it's just so singularly mecca for the best students in the world today at least thing a I I don't know so my last question for you is as some mother and you think about sort of you grew up in China you spent your first 16 years in China you're kids today they're here in the u.s. they're playing I don't know that maybe they're not playing Pokemon go or whatever but they're they they what what do you as someone who has spent all that time in China view as important to pass on to your your kids about the about your background your heritage and so forth as we talked earlier the first session a bit about to what extent people remain connected to their background versus assimilate into the new country what are your thoughts on that so first of all they need to like Chinese and Italian food otherwise we don't know what to cook for them so of course as a as many parents of immigration background we have a tendency to to want our kids to to understand where our heritage come from so luckily my son the six year my daughter's on into their names by I'll tell you later we just had a whole thing about names all right so my son that's trying go right now Wow and let's not come would that let's see how how many years he continues that so um so there is my husband and I do try our best to keep that but but I also in the meantime um really want to respect who they are like my son already asked me like who is he is he American Chinese or Italian and I want to give him the chance to answer especially as he grow up but my answer right now is you're all of the above you know I cannot tell you because you have a Chinese mom you're Chinese so the world is so global as a technologist every piece of technology we create in the past couple of decades in Silicon Valley is to connect people closer you know either by the internet or by AI or you know is to break the barriers to increase our communication increase our connection to increase our understanding and from that point of view I want two or one both of them to be more part of humanity then that strong wall between countries okay well with that thank you so much

Channel: Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR)

Views: 37,598

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Id: lV29vATjoW4

Length: 58min 34sec (3514 seconds)

Published: Mon May 21 2018