I'm a few days late to this, but this story is too good — and too inspirational — to not share here. Last Friday, CNN Money highlighted a Stanford professor's journey from "a nobody, just an immigrant kid [who] didn't speak any English" to a computer science expert who now runs the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
In the piece Fei-Fei Li, PhD, describes coming to the U.S. at the age of 16, jumping in "survival mode" and working a variety of jobs (including cleaning houses) to help her parents get by, and realizing that "seeking knowledge and truth was in my blood." She wound up getting a perfect score in math on her SATs and heading to Princeton (and, later, the California Institute of Technology for grad school) but family financial and medical problems arose. When asked how she kept it all together and became so successful, she answered in part, "if I spend a lot of time lamenting on the difficulties then it could be distracting."
Previously: Exploring the "ridiculously exciting" opportunities for artificial intelligence and From brains to computers: How do we reverse-engineer the most mysterious organ?
Via @AtulButte
Photo by L.A. Cicero
