Meet the Leading Women in AI
As a female founder, I’ve always been keen to showcase diversity in the vastly male-dominated technology world. Since starting the RE•WORK journey five years ago, we’ve hosted more than 10 events focusing on women working in AI. As today is Ada Lovelace Day is today, I thought it was only appropriate to take a look at some of the leading female minds in AI from across the globe.
Known as the first computer programmer in history Ada Lovelace and her visionary approach to computer science built the foundation for the development of computers as we know it today leading us to an era of social and technological change. Although her work didn’t get noticed until a century after she died her contributions to computer science will always be remembered. At the age of twelve, Ada conceptualized a “flying machine”.
Her inventive intuition continued. Working with Charles Babbage she could see that The Difference Engine could be used for much more than crunching numbers — that it could, in the future, translate any content to digital form, including music. This was the first perception of a modern computer. Ada has inspired not only Alan Turing’s work on The Universal Turing Machine but has gone on to inspire millions, even having the language programme that controls the US Military machine named after her.
She is a powerful symbol for women in technology yet in our industry today WIAI seem to be MIA. It hasn’t gone unnoticed that popular virtual assistants Alexa, Cortana, Siri default to having female traits so where are the real women?
Back in 2016, we hosted our first Women in Machine Intelligence Dinner and were joined by both women and men for an evening of keynote presentations and networking. Our speakers for the evening were Irina Higgins, Research Scientist at DeepMind, Raia Hadsell, Senior Research Scientist at DeepMind, Sally Adee, Technology Features Editor at New Scientist and Kerstin Dautenhahn, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Hertfordshire. These influential women shared their breakthrough work in the field and the evening Following on from the success of this dinner, we continued to host female-led events as well as hosting the Women in AI Podcast. We have maintained strong relationships with these women, and recently, Raia joined us on an episode of the podcast, which you can listen to here.
Over the past 2 years, we’ve heard countless testimonials and I’d like to take this opportunity to take a look back at some of our favourites:
“I have always loved games and puzzles. I recently discovered a journal I kept when I was 10, which essentially was a research log of the different experiments my brother and I ran trying to reverse engineer toys we had seen in shops but weren’t allowed to buy. When we realised that we could use a computer to create games, that’s where I turned next. The same journal contains a very excited entry further along (when I was about 13) about how excited my brother and I were working on a new project trying to improve the AI engine of some 3D game environment we had found. Somehow, however, I didn’t feel at the time that a career in computer science was right for me. So, while my brother went to get a CS degree, I chose a more ‘girly’ subject — psychology. I quickly realised though that my brother was learning much more interesting and exciting things than me, so, when the opportunity arose to join the Oxford Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence, I jumped at it. It was amazing for me to combine my passion for computers and brains.”
Irina Higgins, DeepMind, (Women in Machine Intelligence Dinner, 2016)
“I’m fortunate to have worked in labs with lots of women, but it’s important to encourage girls into the industry from a young age and make women feel they can do whatever they want. AI’s not just for boys!”
Georgia Gkioxari, Facebook AI Research (FAIR), (Deep Learning for Robotics Summit, 2018)
“I’ve always been interested in AI because I love sci-fi books and movies, and I saw lots of friendly robots interacting with people doing nice things for them. This interest was sparked at a young age through my education at a computer science high school in Romania. The school had a 50/50 boy-girl split and there was no discrepancy — my grandmother was a maths teacher, my mother was a professor at the University teaching computer science, so I didn’t see a gender gap until moving out of Romania. When I reached the U.S, the proportion of girls was quite shocking…I’m still trying to work out what drives this.”
Doina Precup, DeepMind & McGill University, (Women in AI Podcast, 2017)
“At Coursera I was introduced into a CO of another company and I said it’s really nice to be connected, my assistant James will be in touch to arrange the meeting, and the response I got was ‘Dear Daphne, please can you give me James’ availability for the meeting’ — they just assumed I was his assistant! If we see discrimination happening to female colleagues, don’t just let it slide — let’s stand up to it!”
Daphne Koller, (prev.) Calico Labs, (Deep Learning Summit 2018)
Later this month, we’ll be hosting the Women in AI Dinner in Toronto, where we will learn from Jennifer Gibbs, VP Head of the Office of the Chief Data Officer at TD Bank, Jekaterina Novikova, Director of Machine Learning at WinterLight Labs, and Afsaneh Fazly, Director of Research at Samsung Research Americ. If you’re interested to join us for an evening of discussions & networking around the progress and application of artificial intelligence, you can register to join us in Toronto on October 23 here.
Finally, to honour Ada Lovelace and all women in AI I’d also like to give away a complimentary pass to an upcoming RE•WORK summit. The events provide opportunities to network with global experts, attend interactive workshops and join industry leaders at talks/panel discussion. Are you or do you know a woman working in, or keen to get involved in AI who you think would benefit from attending? Let me know to be in with a chance of winning.
