Inspirational Women in AI & Robotics
Meet 8 International Inspirational Women on March 8
Happy International Women’s Day! Today is one of my favourite days of the year because we all join our voices to ask for what is — or should be — ours.
In the AI & Robotics fields, we have a huge gap to close. How many female coworkers do you have? I can imagine the answer… But that doesn't mean we don’t exist! I want you to think about all our fellow women in these fields, and especially about the girls that are still in school. All of us need role models to look up to and follow. And that’s why today, on IWD, I’m going to feature these 8 inspirational women in AI & Robotics from all over the world.
But wait. At W.AI.R we have asked ourselves: Why do this just once a year? Why don’t we continue sharing empowering stories? So with this article, I announce the launch of the “Inspirational Women in AI & Robotics” Series!
As you might know, our mission at Women in AI & Robotics is to close the gender gap in these fields and increase female representation and participation through mentorship, education, hackathons, and accelerator programs. In the next articles of the series, we’ll introduce you to the amazing women in the W.AI.R network that are working towards gender-inclusive, ethical and responsible solutions that benefits global society.
Joy Buolamwini
Founder at Algorithmic Justice League
- She is Ghanaian-American,
- holds two Masters Degrees in Education and in Algorithmic Bias, and
- is an expert on Bias in AI.
Joy Buolamwini is the poet of code, she uses art and research to illuminate the social implications of AI. In her MIT thesis she exposed the bias in facial-recognition technology and in 2016 she founded the Algorithmic Justice League to challenge bias in decision-making software. Moreover, she launched the Safe Face Pledge, the first agreement that prohibits the lethal application of facial analysis and recognition technology.
“I am a poet of code on a mission to show compassion through computation.”
Remarkable Facts: She was described by Fortune Magazine as “the conscience of the AI Revolution”, and featured in Forbes Top 50 Women in Tech (youngest) and Forbes 30 under 30.
Kate Crawford
Co-Founder at AI Now Institute at NYU
- She was born in the USA,
- holds a PhD in Mathematics, and
- is an expert on the social impacts of large-scale ML and AI.
Kate Crawford is a leading researcher and professor who co-founded the AI Now Institute at NYU, the world’s first university institute dedicated to researching the social implications of AI. She is a Visiting Professor at MIT Media Labs, a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft and the co-founder of Microsoft’s Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics group (FATE).
“There is no quick technical fix to bias. It’s really tempting to want to think that there’s going to be some type of silver-bullet solution that we can just tweak our algorithms, or use different sorts of training data sets, or try to boost signal in particular ways. The problem of this is that it really doesn’t look to the deep social and historical issues that human data is made from.”
Remarkable Facts: In 2016, she co-chaired the White House symposium AI Now on the social and economic implications of AI in the near term. She is also the inaugural Visiting Chair for AI and Justice at the ENS in Paris, and the Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the University of Melbourne.
Rana el Kaliouby
Co-Founder & CEO at Affectiva
- She was born in Egypt,
- holds a PhD in Computer Science, and
- is an expert on Emotion AI.
Rana el Kaliouby has dedicated her career to making AI more emotionally intelligent. In 2009, she co-founded Affectiva, an MIT Media Lab spinoff that developed a technology capable of understanding human emotions, and researched the potential of this technology for autism and mental health treatments. She has shared her personal journey in her memoir, Girl Decoded: A Scientist’s Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology.
“My life’s work is about humanizing technology before it dehumanizes us.”
Remarkable Facts: She is credited with pioneering the field of Emotion AI. She is a Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum and has received prestigious awards like Fortune’s 40 under 40.
Daphne Koller
Founder & CEO at insitro
- She was born in Israel,
- holds a PhD in Computer Science, and
- is an expert on ML & Biomedicine.
Daphne Koller’s wide-ranging career illustrates the symbiosis between academia and industry in the AI field. She has been a CS professor at Stanford since 1995 and in 2012 she co-founded Coursera. In 2018 she founded insitro, a startup that integrates cutting-edge ML techniques with the ground-breaking innovations in life sciences to transform pharmaceutical drug discovery and development.
“Perfect is hard, human biology is hard, but can we improve on where we are? It would be so sad if we couldn’t.”
Remarkable Facts: She was one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people, received the MacArthur fellowship and was awarded the first-ever ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in Computing Sciences.
Fei-Fei Li
Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Standford University
- She was born in China,
- holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering, and
- is an expert on Computer Vision and Cognitively Inspired AI.
Fei-Fei Li is known for inventing ImageNet, a critical large-scale dataset that revolutionised Deep Learning. She is a Sequoia Professor at Standford and launched the University’s Human-Centered AI Institute to advance AI research, education, policy and practice to benefit humanity. She co-founded AI4ALL, a nonprofit aimed at increasing inclusion and diversity in AI education.
“We all have a responsibility to make sure everyone — including companies, governments and researchers — develop AI with diversity in mind.”
Remarkable Facts: She has published more than 200 scientific articles in top-tier journals and conferences. She is an ACM Fellow and was featured in Forbes America’s 50 Women In Tech and Carnegie Foundation’s 40 Great Inmigrants.
Daniela Rus
Director of the Computer Science and AI Laboratory at MIT
- She was born in Romania,
- holds a PhD in Mathematics, and
- is an expert on Robotics & Mobile Computing.
Daniela Rus is the first female head of MIT’s CSAIL. She previously founded the Dartmouth Robotics Lab and is known for her pioneering work in self-reconfiguring robots which adapt to different environments by changing their internal structure. She is also the current Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
“It’s really important to consider what is it that we should do today that still has an impact 25 years from today.”
Remarkable Facts: She is a MacArthur Fellow, a fellow of ACM, AAAI and IEEE, and a member of the National Academy of Engineers, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Kriti Sharma
Founder at AI for Good
- She was born in India,
- holds an MSc in Advanced Computer Science, and
- is an expert on Chatbots and AI Ethics.
Kriti Sharma is on a mission to create intelligent, ethical and scalable technologies for a better, fairer world and to achieve this she founded AI for Good. She also launched rAInbow, a digital companion for women facing domestic violence and collaborated with the Population Foundation of India to launch Dr Sneha, an AI-powered digital character to engage with young people about sexual health.
“If there were more women working in bots & Artificial Intelligence, women wouldn’t be an afterthought when building new technology.”
Remarkable Facts: She was featured in Forbes 30 Under 30 list for advancements in AI and appointed a United Nations Young Leader. Currently, she is an advisor to both the United Nations Technology Innovation Labs and to the UK Government’s Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation.
Rachel Thomas
Director at USF Center for Applied Data Ethics and Founder at fast.ai
- She was born in the USA,
- holds a PhD in Mathematics, and
- is an expert on Data Ethics, AI accessibility and bias in ML.
Rachel Thomas founded and directs the University of San Francisco’s Center for Applied Data Ethics, which addresses issues like bias, disinformation, and predictive policing through advocacy, education, research, and policy. She also co-founded fast.ai, where she helped create the most popular free online course on Deep Learning, bringing people from around the world with diverse and nontraditional backgrounds into AI.
“Our motto [fast.ai] is ‘making neural nets uncool again’ because being cool is about being exclusive, and that’s the opposite of what I want.”
Remarkable Facts: She was featured in Forbes 20 Incredible Women in AI and was profiled in the book Women Tech Founders on the Rise. Her writing has been read by nearly a million people and made the front page of Hacker News 9x.
I feel so empowered after writing about these amazing women — I hope you feel the same way!
As a farewell, I leave you with this 1-minute pitch by another inspiring woman from South Africa — Cassie Kozyrkov, Chief Decision Scientist at Google — on why diversity in AI is a must-have.
I will be back soon with more
Inspirational Women in AI & Robotics!
