Rana el Kaliouby, CEO of Affectiva, is one of eight women pioneers in AI. Her company specializes in training AI in emotional intelligence. Source: PBS.org NOVA Wonders episode)

From Ethics Activist to Engineers & Entrepreneurs: 8 Women AI Leaders

Forbes’ columnist Rob Toews listed eight women in the artificial intelligence field whom he considers among the most influential. Their profiles are drastically different, but their contributions are outsized an industry comprised of only 12% women.

Here are his choices and short descriptions, some of whom are having a global impact in the male-dominated field.

Joy Buolamwini: Founder, Algorithmic Justice League
Buolamwini did pioneering work on algorithmic bias as a graduate student at MIT on racial and gender prejudices embedded in facial recognition systems.

“Amazon, Microsoft and IBM each suspended their facial recognition offerings this year as a result of Buolamwini’s research, acknowledging that the technology was not yet fit for public use. Buolamwini’s work is powerfully profiled in the new documentary Coded Bias.”

Claire Delaunay: VP Engineering, NVIDIA

Delaunay is focused on building tools and platforms to enable the deployment of autonomous machines at scale. Her past work history included key roles in numerous start-ups.

Rana el Kaliouby: CEO & Co-Founder, Affectiva

Kaliouby is the founder of startup Affectiva, which is developing emotional intelligence in AI. The company’s technology is used by “25% of the Fortune 500, including for media analytics, consumer behavioral research and automotive use cases.”

Daphne Koller: CEO & Founder, insitro

Koller is the founding CEO at insitro, a startup applying machine learning to speed pharmaceutical drug discovery and development. It has raised roughly $250 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others. Recently it partnered with Bristol Myers Squibb. In 2012 she co-founded education technology startup Coursera with fellow Stanford professor and AI leader Andrew Ng. It’s now worth $2.6 billion.

Fei-Fei Li: Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University

Li, a tenured professor at Stanford, served as Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud, headed Stanford’s AI lab, joined the Board of Directors at Twitter, cofounded the prominent nonprofit AI4ALL, and launched Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute (HAI). She advocates for “a more inclusive, equitable and human approach to AI.”

Anna Patterson: Founder & Managing Partner, Gradient Ventures

As an executive at Google, where she started in 2004, Patterson led AI efforts as VP of Engineering. In 2017, she launched Google’s AI venture capital fund Gradient Ventures, where today she invests in early-stage AI startups. She serves on the board of AI startups including Algorithmia, Labelbox and test.ai. She is also a board director at Square.

Daniela Rus: Director, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL)

One of the leader developers of robots, Rus has furthered the development of networked collaborative robots, self-reconfigurable robots and soft robots, all while acting as MIT professor and the first female head of MIT’s prestigious Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL).

Shivon Zilis: Board Member, OpenAI; Project Director, Neuralink

Zilis has been on the leadership teams of several high-profile companies: OpenAI, Neuralink, Tesla, Bloomberg Beta. She’s the youngest board member at OpenAI, the influential research lab behind breakthroughs like GPT-3, and is a key player in developing Neuralink.

Based on his interviews with the women, collaboration appears to be one of the greatest strengths they offer, in addition to their formidable intellects.

read more at forbes.com