“Though she be but little, she is fierce.”
This Shakespeare quote from A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems to speak directly to the number of women in the field of AI. Though they only make up a small percentage of the workforce, women are making huge contributions to the field through their work regarding algorithmic bias, emotional intelligence, and open source coding, among other categories. These six women ‘fiercely’ exemplify what it means to be a woman in AI and the innovation, perseverance, and passion it takes to get to the top.
Dr. Fei Fei Li is the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University and Co-Director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute. Her work currently focuses on cognitively inspired AI, machine learning, deep learning, computer vision and AI+healthcare (especially ambient intelligent systems for healthcare delivery). Dr. Li is the inventor of ImageNet and the ImageNet Challenge, a large visual database designed for use in visual object recognition software research that has contributed to the cutting-edge developments in deep learning and AI. In addition to her, she is a leading voice for advocating diversity in STEM and AI. She serves as co-founder and chairperson of the national non-profit, AI4ALL, aimed at increasing inclusion and diversity in AI education.
Dr. Joy Buolamwini is a computer scientist and “poet of code”who uses art and research to illuminate the social implications of artificial intelligence. She founded the Algorithmic Justice League to create a world with more equitable and accountable technology, and her TED Featured Talk on algorithmic bias has over 1.4 million views. Her MIT thesis methodology uncovered large racial and gender bias in AI services from companies like Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon, and in 2020, these companies stepped back from selling facial recognition technology to law enforcement. Joy’s journey is reflected in the documentary, Coded Bias, which sheds lights on the potential threat A.I. poses to both civil rights and democracy as a whole.
Dr. Daphne Koller is a former professor in the department of computer science at Stanford University and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship recipient. She is one of the founders of Coursera, an online education platform that provides free courses to the public. Her work in artificial intelligence focuses on its applications in the biomedical sciences, and she currently serves as the founding CEO of Insitro, a startup focused on transforming the idea of drug discovery.
Dr. Daniela Rus currently serves as the Director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and is also the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT. Rus’s research interests are primarily focused in robotics, mobile computing, and data science., and she is a Class of 2002 MacArthur Fellow. Her research addresses gaps between where robots are today and where she envisions they could be by increasing the ability of machines to reason, learn, and adapt to complex tasks in human-centered environments. The applications of this work include transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, construction, monitoring the environment, underwater exploration, smart cities, medicine, and in-home tasks such as cooking.
Shivon Zilis is the Director of Operations at Neuralink, Board Member and Advisor at OpenAI, and Founding Fellow of the Creative Destruction Lab Incubator. Shivon is self proclaimed “obsessed” with the most important life changing work, machine intelligence, and has spent her career to date focusing on its use for good. OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. Their major breakthrough, the Generative Pretrained Transformer-3 or GPT-3, offers, unlike most AI systems that are designed for one use-case, a general-purpose “text in, text out” interface, allowing users to try it on virtually any English language task. Shivon has been with OpenAI as an Advisor since 2016 and is also the youngest board member there.
Dr. Rana el Kaliouby is the current Deputy CEO at Smart Eye and formerly, Co-Founder and CEO of Affectiva, an MIT spin-off and category defining AI company that is focused on bringing emotional intelligence to our digital world. Talented in a variety of fields, Rana is a bestselling author of Girl Decoded: A Scientist’s Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology, which follows her personal journey about growing up in the Middle East and moving to the United States to become an entrepreneur, juxtaposed against her work building Emotion AI. As one of few women leading an AI company, she cares deeply about her role as an advocate for diversity and inclusion in tech and leadership. To help catalyze change and improve equity industry-wide, she is a member of the Boston Steering Committee for All Raise supporting female founders and funders.
