Deep Dojo

The Story Behind ImageNet

Dave Gershgorn covers the story of Fei-Fei Li and her motivation for creating the dataset.

“In 2009, Li and her team published the ImageNet paper with the dataset — to little fanfare. Li recalls that CVPR, a leading conference in computer vision research, only allowed a poster, instead of an oral presentation, and the team handed out ImageNet-branded pens to drum up interest. People were skeptical of the basic idea that more data would help them develop better algorithms.”

— Dave Gershgorn

Within three years, everything would change.

“If the artificial intelligence boom we see today could be attributed to a single event, it would be the announcement of the 2012 ImageNet challenge results.

Geoffrey Hinton, Ilya Sutskever, and Alex Krizhevsky from the University of Toronto submitted a deep convolutional neural network architecture called AlexNet — still used in research to this day — which beat the field by a whopping 10.8 percentage point margin.”