The Future of AI: Five Women Making Waves in Technology

Revisiting the contributions of female entrepreneurs in the realm of Artificial Intelligence, their groundbreaking advances have been instrumental in propelling this technology to new heights. There is no doubt that the way these women in AI are changing the working paradigm is transforming the societal norms for many young girls. As the AI industry snowballs, it's crucial to accentuate the contributions of women in this field. Female AI scientists and professionals have been making waves, and their contributions are invaluable. In this blog post, we'll explore the top five female contributors in AI. Following are some prominent women in engineering whose work has inspired women to become part of the computing world.

Karen Hao — Ethical AI Advocate

Karen Hao is an AI reporter for MIT Technology Review. Her focus is on the societal implications of AI and ensuring that this technology is used ethically and responsibly. Karen is always vocal about inclusion and tech diversity. Her work is a living example of this notion.

Karen explained in a podcast for WiDS, 'Covering AI and Ethics in the Tech Industry'.

“When you’re inside a technology company and you’re thinking this is going to help change the world, you’re often blind to the unattended consequences of your work.”

She also emphasizes that it's essential to have more diverse teams to build a responsible and inclusive community for women in AI. For example, Karen's work has shown that facial recognition technologies have shown to have biases against darker-skinned individuals.

Fei-Fei Li — Computer Vision Expert

Fei-Fei Li is a born computer scientist. Her main research is in developing Intelligent machines that can understand the visual world, and she has been at the forefront of many groundbreaking research papers. Fei-Fei Li believes we need a more human-centered approach to AI.

Back in 2015, Fei-Fei Li emphasized including AI in curriculum and research during an interview with WIRED.

“We need to inject humanism into our AI education and research by injecting all walks of life into the process.”

Timnit Gebru — Ethical AI Advocate

Timnit Gebru is a computer scientist and an AI ethical researcher. Her research encompasses data mining, computer vision, and natural language processing. As a leading figure in AI Ethics, she highlights the socioeconomic impact of AI and the need to incorporate diversity and inclusion for women in engineering. Featured in the Salesforce story, Timnit explained how AI could cause business biases.

“We’re seeing a kind of a Wild West situation with AI and regulation right now. The scale at which businesses are adopting AI technologies isn’t matched by clear guidelines to regulate algorithms and help researchers avoid the pitfalls of bias in datasets. We need to advocate for a better system of checks and balances to test AI for bias and fairness, and to help businesses determine whether certain use cases are even appropriate for this technology at the moment.”

In 2018, Timnit Gebru surveyed facial recognition software used by three big tech companies and found their algorithms misclassified darker-skinned women up to 35% of the time. Her research has been pivotal in shedding light on the biases, lack of transparency, and ethical concerns in AI systems.

Daphne Koller — Machine Learning Expert

Daphne Koller focuses on probabilistic models and their applications for AI. Daphne pioneered using Bayesian networks to represent and reason complex and uncertain problems in artificial intelligence. She believes that AI should work on a more important mission to solve global issues such as climate change. Daphne's work in machine learning has been influential in developing algorithms for improving learning in medical diagnosis and treatment planning. Her contributions are a source of inspiration for women in engineering fields. Daphne explained in her Medium blog:

“We plan to collect and use a range of very large data sets to train ML [machine learning] models that will help address key problems in the drug discovery and development process. The ML models that are developed will then help guide subsequent experiments, providing a tight, closed-loop integration of in silico and in vitro methods.”

Rana el Kaliouby - A leading EI Expert

As a pioneer in artificial emotional intelligence (EI), el Kaliouby's work focuses on creating machines that can understand human emotions. She laid the foundation of Affectiva which focuses on the recognition of emotions. For CEO Magazine, Rana explained the challenges with data and aI, “The biggest issue in AI today is data and algorithmic bias,” she said and added,

“If you train any AI algorithm on data that’s not diverse, it becomes biased, and then if you deploy it around the world, and scale it, you’ve accentuated the bias that exists in society by thousands of times.”

This technology can be implied in a panoply of applications from farms to the market. El Kaliouby's work has been widely recognized, including being named to Forbes' list of America's Top 50 Women in Technology and serving on the World Economic Forum's Global AI Council.

The AI field has a gender diversity problem, but these five women in AI have made significant contributions and are setting the standard for what women in AI/engineering can achieve. Karen, Fei-Fei, Timnit, Daphne, and Rana el Kaliouby are trailblazers in AI innovation who are a source of inspiration for many young women to pursue their dreams in the technology industry. These women have broken barriers and made exceptional contributions, and their work continues to pave the way for future female leaders in AI. We must continue to celebrate their successes while also recognizing the need for more gender balance across all sectors of innovation. By doing so, it will foster an environment where anyone has access to resources needed to reach their goals regardless of gender or background – this should serve as motivation for us all!

Women in STEMTayyaba QamarSeptember 20, 2023