John Hopfield and Fei-Fei Li win Queen Elizabeth Prize as pioneers in modern AI

The Office of Communications

on Feb. 6, 2025, 3:49 p.m.

John Hopfield and Fei-Fei Li

Photos by Matt Raspanti, Office of Communications; Drew Kelly, courtesy Stanford University

Princeton Nobel Laureate in Physics John Hopfield and alumnus Fei-Fei Li of the Class of 1999 were two of seven scientists and engineers awarded the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering in London on Feb. 4 as pioneers in the modern machine learning that drives artificial intelligence.

"Together, the work of these engineers has laid the foundations for the machine learning that lies behind many of the most exciting innovations shaping the world today," the award announcement said.

Ceremonies for the QEPrize, as it is known, were held in London's Science Museum, with Princess Anne — a Royal Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering — presiding.

Hopfield is Princeton's Howard A. Prior Professor in the Life Sciences, Emeritus, and a professor of molecular biology, emeritus. He holds associated faculty status in physics and neuroscience. He taught for 16 years as a professor of physics and helped establish the Princeton Neuroscience Institute.

He was honored along with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun and with Geoffrey Hinton, with whom he shared the 2024 Nobel Prize for the blue-sky research behind neural networks. The four "have long championed artificial neural networks as an effective model for machine learning and this is now the dominant paradigm," the QEPrize Foundation said in the award announcement. "Together they are responsible for the conceptual foundations of this approach."

Li was honored for establishing "the importance of providing high quality datasets, both to benchmark progress and underpin the training of machine learning algorithms," the announcement said. "By creating ImageNet, a large-scale image database used for object recognition software research, she enabled access to millions of labelled images that have been instrumental in training and evaluating computer vision algorithms."

Li was on the Princeton faculty when she conceived of and began building the extraordinary dataset that led to this week's prize, a project she chronicles in her memoir, “The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI.” She is now the Sequoia Capital Professor in Computer Science at Stanford University and a founding codirector of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

Princeton computer scientists Jia Deng, Kai Li and Olga Russakovsky are also members of the ImageNet senior research team.

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