Mercer Times

Princeton Nobel Laureate John Hopfield and Fei-Fei Li, a Princeton alumnus, have been recognized with the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. The award ceremony took place in London on February 4, acknowledging their pioneering contributions to modern machine learning and artificial intelligence.

The award announcement highlighted the significance of their work: "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 QEPrize ceremonies were held at London's Science Museum, with Princess Anne presiding over the event as a Royal Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

John Hopfield, who is Princeton's Howard A. Prior Professor in the Life Sciences, Emeritus, and a professor of molecular biology emeritus, was honored alongside Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun, and Geoffrey Hinton. These scientists shared recognition for their foundational research in neural networks. The QEPrize Foundation noted that they "have long championed artificial neural networks as an effective model for machine learning and this is now the dominant paradigm." They are credited with establishing conceptual foundations in this field.

Fei-Fei Li was acknowledged for her role in emphasizing high-quality datasets crucial for benchmarking progress and training machine learning algorithms. Her creation of ImageNet provided access to millions of labeled images vital for computer vision algorithm development. Li initiated this project while on Princeton's faculty; she currently serves as Sequoia Capital Professor in Computer Science at Stanford University and co-directs Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

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