Stanford University has announced that the Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL) and Stanford Vision Lab Dr. Fei-Fei Li will co-direct the California university’s new Human-Centered AI Initiative (HAI). Dr. Li will work alongside former Stanford Provost John Etchemendy at HAI, with a mission “to advance AI research, education, policy, and practice to benefit humanity.”

The multi-disciplinary HAI Team includes Professor of Political Science, Director of the Center for Ethics in Society, and Co-director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society Rob Reich; Associate Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Data Science Nigam Shah; Director of Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering and Environment Project Londa Schiebinger; Thomas M. Siebel Professor in Machine Learning Christopher Manning; Professor of Medicine — Cardiovascular Euan Ashley, and others.

The HAI Team will explore beneficial AI applications in areas such as ethics, healthcare and medicine, language and communication, and the eradication of unfair biases based on sex, race and other identifiers. The HAI website identifies the initiative’s three principal areas of focus as “Develop AI”, “Guide and Study”, and “Design and Create.”

HAI is now calling for proposals for their second seed grant. Some of the 25 research projects funded at launch include:

A blog on the HAI website co-authored by Fei-Fei Li and John Etchemendy details the inspiration behind the program’s creation. The authors believe that technology has pushed human society to a historic turning point and that the emergence of AI is by far the most disruptive force informing both the “inspiring” and the “worrisome” changes we are seeing today. This is why, they argue, “the next frontier in AI cannot simply be technological — it must be humanistic as well.”

It’s hoped that HAI can “foster a global dialogue among academia, industry, government, and civil society; and encourage responsible leadership in all sectors.”

On her Moments in WeChat (similar to Facebook’s Newsfeed), Dr. Li outlined her goals for the initiative:

Contribute to the development of the next generation of AI (with a focus on the intersection between Brain Science and Cognitive Science) Study and predict the impact of AI on human society and daily lives. Design and implement human-centred AI technologies and applications

Fei-Fei Li returned to Stanford earlier this year after a two-year stint as Chief Scientist of the AI & ML Department on the Google Cloud Platform.