Christiane Fellbaum (Humanities Council, Linguistics, and Computer Science) is featured in this year’s Princeton Pre-read, “The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI,” written by Fei Fei Li ’99.
The memoir traces Li’s personal history as a young immigrant and scientist at the forefront of artificial intelligence.
In the book, Li describes a chance encounter with Fellbaum that altered the course of her career, as Fellbaum introduced her to the lexical database project WordNet. As co-creator of WordNet with George Miller (Psychology, emeritus) and WordNet’s long-standing director, Fellbaum has overseen the online resource that documents the full range of meanings of words and collocations in a wide array of languages, including Arabic, American Sign Language, and English.
“WordNet was a revelation. It provided an answer, or at least a hint, to the questions that had consumed so much of my waking life…there was a path before me for the first time, and I could see the next step,” writes Li, in the book. Inspired by that meeting, Li went on to establish ImageNet, a dataset that enabled rapid advances in computer vision.
Read more about the Princeton Pre-read Assembly with Fei-Fei Li and about Christiane Fellbaum’s mentorship on the University homepage.
