Robust academic research, entrepreneurial spirit, and substantial investments have fueled a dynamic AI ecosystem in the United States of America. The USA is undoubtedly one of the global leaders in AI innovation and implementation. It is home to tech giants like Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon and a thriving startup ecosystem.
Despite its rapid growth and immense potential, the AI landscape is characterized by a stark imbalance in gender representation. Women constitute 12-16% of the global AI workforce, whereas they make up 35% of the global tech workforce.
While at present, women are disproportionately represented in the AI workforce and leadership, the future is bright, as proven by the women we are about to celebrate in this post.
Stories of the top 10 leading women in AI in the United States of America
From Joy Buolamwini’s fight against bias in AI algorithms to Cynthia Dwork’s work in ensuring data privacy in AI, women have been making significant strides.
We will pick some stories of women in AI tech that can inspire generations to come. This is by no means an exhaustive list of women with illustrious careers in AI, and we are likely to miss some names.
10. Kate Crawford
Kate Crawford is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, New York, and a professor at the University of Southern California. She’s dedicated her career to examining the power dynamics embedded within AI systems.
Kate Crawford’s celebrated book, “Atlas of AI,” is a spectacular scrutiny of the paraphernalia of the AI industry. It delves into the environmental costs, labor practices, and geopolitical impacts of the AI industry.
Her work is juxtaposed with the uncritical hype surrounding AI and serves as a strong counterbalance that pushes for a more equitable, and responsible AI ecosystem.
9. Alondra Nelson
Alondra Nelson is a leading scholar who positions herself at the intersection of artificial intelligence, social science, technology, and public policy. She played a key role in shaping the federal policy around AI in the United States.
She has worked towards highlighting the social implications of AI adoption, creating a unique perspective.
8. Dr. Rana El Kaliouby
Dr. Kaliouby has played a pivotal role in shaping the areas of emotion recognition and understanding. She co-founded Affectiva, a company that specializes in emotion-ageing recognition technology.
She is one of the global leaders when it comes to emotion AI. Her book “Girl Decoded” is an inspiring account of her journey with insights into the connection between technology and humans.
7. Daphne Koller
Daphne Koller is a powerhouse when it comes to academic research and entrepreneurial spirit. She co-founded Coursera – a massive open online course (MOOC) platform, in 2012.
Then, in 2016, she left Coursera and accepted a new challenge at the Google-funded R&D company Calico, which focused on aging and age-related diseases.
Then, in 2018, she founded a machine learning-powered drug discovery company, Insitro.
Her academic research has contributed to various fields, such as bioinformatics and natural language processing.
6. Joy Buolamwini
Joy Buolamwini is the founder of the Algorithmic Justice League or AJL. It’s an organization dedicated to raising awareness about racial bias in AI systems.
She highlighted how facial recognition systems are trained with disproportionate data and how they show disparities when it comes to recognizing people of color.
Boulamwini’s research named Gender Shades uncovers the bias underlying commercial AI-based facial recognition systems which show much higher error rates for identifying women and individuals with darker skin.
Apart from identifying problems she has also provided solutions like algorithmic audits and bias testing for just and unbiased AI systems.
5. Mira Murati
Mira Murati is the Chief Technology Officer at OpenAI, the single most influential company in the field of consumer AI solutions.
Murati plays a significant role in the company’s evolution leading its research, product, and safety functions. She contributed to the development of ChatGPT, DALL-E, and GPT-4.
Earlier in her career, she served as a senior product manager at Tesla. Her latter rise to prominence coincided with the peak of public interest in AI.
4. Daniela Amodei
Daniela Amodei is a pioneer in AI safety. She is at the helm of Anthropic, a company dedicated to developing safe and reliable AI systems.
A lot of her work revolves around the safe and responsible development of AI that aligns with human values. Her company, Anthropic, is playing a crucial role in addressing concerns about the potential risk of AI.
Before Anthropic, Daniela Amodei oversaw the NLP and music generation teams at OpenAI.
3. Cynthia Breazeal
A pioneer in social robotics, Cynthia Breazeal is renowned for her contributions to understanding human-robot interaction. Her research was focused on creating robots that can respond to human emotions and behaviors.
Breazeal co-founded Jibo, a consumer-focused robot designed for domestic use. Before that, she contributed to a robot named Kismet – which is designed to recognize human emotions, and Leonardo – a robot capable of adapting its behavior based on what it learns from human interactions.
Cynthia Breazeal is currently a professor of media art and science at MIT.
2. Carla Gentry
Carla Gentry is celebrated for her work in the field of data science and analytics. The foundation of AI is data, and Carla Gentry’s company, Analytical Solution, is a significant contributor to the fulfillment of data-driven visions.
Despite facing several challenges in her personal life, Carla Gentry did some exceptional work in the area of data science. She plays a crucial role in educating people about AI. She is an inspiration for women in STEM.
Carla Gentry is currently the owner and Chief Data Scientist at Analytical-Solution.
1. Dr. Fei-Fei Li
Born in Beijing, China, Fei-Fei Li has made an inspiring journey to become one of America’s most celebrated women in the field of AI. Her work in the domain of computer vision and image recognition is pioneering.
Fei-Fei Li worked on the ImageNet project which involved creating a massive database of manually annotated and labeled images. This went on to become the foundation for the development of deep learning algorithms and countless advancements in image recognition, object detection, and other computer vision tasks.
Dr. Li contributed to the correlation between the human brain and AI through her work in Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience. She is currently a Sequoia Capital Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and Co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute.
To conclude
As we declared earlier, this is not an exhaustive list nor an attempt to rank the marvelous contributions of these women in the field of AI. It’s more of a tribute. We have missed personalities like Allie Miller, Jennifer Chayes, Anima Anandkumar, and Corinna Cortes, among many others worth mentioning – kudos to all of them for the great work they have been doing. It’s evident that women are doing great things in the field of AI, and it’s high time we saw more of them in the AI workforce.
