Quartz (July 26) -- In 2006, Fei-Fei Li, a newly minted professor of computer science at Illinois, decided to aid artificial intelligence efforts by building a better dataset that mapped the world of objects. The resulting dataset was called ImageNet, which quickly evolved into an annual competition to see which algorithms could identify objects in the dataset’s images with the lowest error rate. Many see it as the catalyst for the AI boom the world is experiencing today.