You already know that artificial intelligence is grabbing the world, transforming nearly every industry, business, trade, and function. But what you might not know are the incredible AI technologist and researchers powering the edge of this momentous revolution.
Breakthroughs in AI are incredible, isn’t it? But how does it all occur? It’s when extremely talented and diverse thinkers from unique backgrounds, disciplines, expertise, and perspectives come forward. You might think of names like Andrew Ng (Baidu), Amit Singhal (Uber), Elon Musk (SpaceX & Tesla), Ginni Rometty (IBM) and Ray Kurzweil (Google) – but wait why all men?
2019 March, on International Women’s Day, CloudXLab aims to showcase 11 incredible women in AI.
11 Incredible Women In The AI Today
Building on what we said, here is a list of eleven incredible women who have excelled in the world of Artificial intelligence.
1. Rana el Kaliouby
CEO, Affectiva
What She Does – She is regarded as the pioneer in emotional AI or emotional intelligence (EQ). She co-founded the start-up Affectiva, and invented the emotion recognition technology, which is used by the company to give life to their mission i.e. Humanize Technology with Artificial Emotional Intelligence. Prior to founding Affectiva, she headed applications for facial coding to benefit mental health, autism and other research areas as a research scientist at MIT Media Lab.
2. Fei-Fei Li
Co-Director, Stanford University’s Human-Centered AI Institute and Stanford Vision Lab & Co-Founder AI4ALL.
What She Does – Currently the Co-Director of Stanford University’s Human-Centered AI Institute and the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab. In 2017, she co-founded AI4ALL, a nonprofit organization working to increase diversity and inclusion in the field of artificial intelligence. Li also joined Google Cloud as Chief Scientist of Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning to advance her mission of “democratizing AI”. She is best known for her prominent work is in the field of computer vision. She is also part of scientific teams who have made advancements in image recognition software. Beyond meek identification of objects in visuals, Image Recognition can now recognize scenes and generate descriptions of them in English – Thanks to Li and her team.
3. Daphne Koller
Founder And CEO, Insitro
What She Does – Koller is considered as one of the leading scientists in the field of AI. She initiated and led one of the worlds largest online education platform, Coursera. She was an artificial intelligence researcher at the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University and, chief computing officer at Alphabet’s Calico Labs. Koller is now heading new machine learning drug discovery venture called Insitro.
4. Cynthia Breazeal
Founder & Chief Scientist – Jibo, Inc.
What She Does – Founder and Chief Scientist at Jibo, Inc., i.e. a firm that focusses in developing social robots, and a pioneer in Social Robotics and Human-Robot Interaction. Cynthia’s research mainly focusses on developing the principles, technologies, and techniques, for personal robots which are socially intelligent and can communicate with humans on human-centric terms. In addition to this, Cynthia is also associated with MIT as Associate Professor of Media Arts and Science. At MIT, she founded and directs the Personal Robots Group at the Media Lab.
5. Latanya Sweeney
Professor at Harvard University
What She Does – She is the Professor of Government and Technology at Harvard and Director of Harvard’s Data Privacy Lab. Prior to this, she served as the Chief Technologist of the Federal Trade Commission. She has made several contributions to privacy technology and best-known for her academic work on the theory of k-anonymity. At Harvard Sweeney tackles socio-political and governance issues with technology.
6. Aleatha Parker-Wood
Sr. Principal Research Engineer and Manager at Symantec
What She Does – She led a team of Ph.D. researchers dedicated to protecting people and their data, using hi-tech Machine Learning and security expertise. In addition to research, she also teaches and mentors the next generation of engineers and scientists. At Symantec, she created and deployed advanced ML which powers symantec’s latest antivirus product. Aleatha also created ML for URL reputation engines, Advanced Threat Protection, and many Symantec products.
7. Catherine Havasi
Principal, Snowcap Ai & CEO, Luminoso
What she does – Havasi is Principal at Smowcap Ai, a company that aims to help businesses extract real value from artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. She is also CEO and co-founder at Luminoso. Havasi was one of the people behind ConceptNet, an open-source natural language artificial intelligence program and one of the creators of the MIT’s Open Mind Common Sense project. In 2015, she was named one of the “100 Most Creative People in Business”.
8. Carol Reiley
Co-Founder & President, Drive.ai
What She Does – An engineering entrepreneur, AI roboticist, and executive, Carol is also nicknamed as “Mother Of Robots”. She co-founded multiple startups and launched several robotics products in highly regulated industries. She is also the co-founder of drive.ai, a Silicon Valley startup specializing in Level 4 self-driving cars.
9. Manuela M. Veloso
Professor at Carnegie Mellon University
What She Does – Veloso is observed as an international expert on AI, robotics and machine learning. She is head of Machine Learning Department in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and professor at Herbert A. Simon University. Veloso was the co-founder and former president of the RoboCup Federation, and until 2014 she was the president of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
10. Hilary Mason
GM of Machine Learning, Cloudera
What She Does – GM of Research at Cloudera. Hilary is also the Founder of Fast Forward Labs, a machine intelligence research company, and was the Data Scientist in Residence at Accel and the Chief Scientist at bitly.
11. Cassie Kozyrkov
Chief Decision Scientist, Google, Inc.
What She Does – Cassie is a data scientist and executive at Google. She is on a mission to democratize Decision Intelligence and safe, reliable AI. According to her LinkedIn profile she has provided guidance on more than 100 projects and designed Google’s analytics program, personally training over 15000 Googlers in statistics, decision-making, and machine learning.
This list of 11 incredible women in AI isn’t a comprehensive one. There are many more talented people contributing to this field than we can summarize in a single article.
In A Man’s World…. Women Still Struggle To Find A Strong Foothold
Yes, it’s true that – it is still a man’s world! Women are often understated in STEM fields – i.e. Science, Technology, Engineering, And Math; in fact, they must struggle every single day to make a mark in it. Unfortunately, the disparity between the number of men and women with successful careers in STEM is huge.
But the good news is – this Gap is shrinking steadily. Yes, Women aren’t giving up! Instead, they are working hard towards making their mark in the world of data and technology. All the women featured here have overcome personal and professional challenges to attain incredible impact and become role models for the industry. We are proud to tell you their stories.
Happy Women’s Day 2019!
