Fei-Fei Li to step aside as Google Cloud’s leader and Chief Scientist

Fei-Fei Li, current head of Google Cloud, will return to her professorship at Stanford University after two years working for the company, according to a post by Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene. Andrew Moore, Dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University will succeed Li to lead the department. After Li’s departure for Google, she will continue to work with Google as an adviser.

Li’s resignation from Google was expected when she started working for Google. According to the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab’s post in January 2017, Li would be on the leave from Stanford from the second half of 2018. While Li was working for Google, she continued to work with her graduate students, postdoc and collaborators at the university.

Li’s been lead artificial intelligence and machine learning research at Google and announced the opening of Google AI’s China center at the end of 2017, Google’s first AI center in Asia. The key research areas include deep learning, reinforcement learning, and language and vision.

Google AI’s China center was led by Fei-Fei Li and Jia Li, former head of Research at Snapchat who later joined Google as Head of research and development of Google Cloud and is presently the head of their China Center. In the announcement of the opening of the China center, Fei-Fei Li said China had many world-class AI and machine learning experts and more than 40 percent of top 100 AI papers in 2015 were published by Chinese researchers.

According to local media reports, Fei-Fei Li said her leave wouldn’t affect the operation of Google’s China Center.