In the past decade, we've experienced many remarkable technical advancements. Starting with the emergence of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, then came Generative Adversarial Networks, and now there is the advent of Generative AI. Throughout, visual technologies have enabled computers to see.

The majority of data our brains analyze is visual so the majority of data that AI will analyze will be visual as well. Visual data and visual technologies are critical for the success of artificial intelligence horizontally across all sectors.

Here at LDV Capital, we’ve been investing exclusively in visual tech and AI and we are still the only venture capital firm with this thesis. Since 2012, we have been showcasing brilliant women whose work in visual tech and AI is reshaping business and society. In 2020, we started our “Women Leading Visual Tech” series. We are thrilled to showcase an expanded list of women behind many of the technological innovations that we experience today. Their contributions are extremely valuable to our ecosystem and the world.

Our initial list consists of 121 names placed in alphabetical order. It features experts in machine vision, pattern recognition and generative models for digitizing the real world, as well as leaders in quantum hardware, nanophotonics and semiconductors which is the foundation for all the visual tech and AI progress.

We want to thank our team, LDV Experts and our Community for nominating their colleagues, friends and peers.

There are many more brilliant women – technologists, researchers, entrepreneurs – and we will keep updating this article as we meet more of them. Whom did we miss? Nominate colleagues or friends who build leapfrog deep tech solutions leveraging visual tech & AI to reshape business and society.

Dr. Lourdes Agapito holds the position of Professor of 3D Vision at the Department of Computer Science, University College London where she heads the 3D Vision research lab, focused on the inference of 3D information from images and videos. Dr. Agapito has been the Program Chair for CVPR'16 and ICCV'23, and keynote speaker at ICLR'21 and ICRA'17. In 2017, she co-founded Synthesia, the leading AI video generation platform, one of our LDV portfolio companies.

We discussed synthetic media and its way of transforming the film industry, online shopping, and more.

Dr. Zeynep Akata – a Liesel Beckmann Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the Technical University of Munich and the director of the Institute for Explainable Machine Learning at Helmholtz Munich. She received a Lise-Meitner Award for Excellent Women in Computer Science from the Max Planck Society, a young scientist honor from the Werner-von-Siemens-Ring foundation, an ERC-2019 Starting Grant from the European Commission, The DAGM German Pattern Recognition Award, The ECVA Young Researcher Award and the Alfried Krupp Award.

Dr. Anima Anandkumar – a Bren Professor at Caltech and Senior Director of AI Research at NVIDIA. Her work developing novel artificial intelligence algorithms enables and accelerates scientific applications of AI, including scientific simulations, weather forecasting, autonomous drone flights and drug design. She has received best paper awards at NeurIPS and the ACM Gordon Bell Special Prize for HPC-Based COVID-19 Research.

At our 8th Annual LDV Vision Summit, she spoke about the convergence of AI and scientific computing.

Dr. Ruzena Bajcsy – the NEC Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. She was the founding director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society. She played a founding role in establishing a program of Digital Humanities. She was also the founder of UPenn GRASP Lab. Dr. Bajcsy is a member of NAE and NaM. She is the recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Computer and Cognitive Sciences and the IEEE Robotics and Automation Award for her contributions to the field of robotics and automation.

Dr. Kavita Bala – Inaugural Dean of the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. She co-founded GrokStyle, a graphics search company that won our 2016 LDV Vision Summit Entrepreneurial Computer Vision Competition and GrokStyle was acquired by Facebook/Meta. In 2019, she was elected as an ACM Fellow "for contributions to rendering and scene understanding” and in 2020, she received an ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award.

Check out our interview on bridging the gap between academia and industry.

Dr. Marian Stewart Bartlett – a Research Scientist at Apple working in machine learning for health. Previously, she was a Research Professor at the University of California San Diego. She has authored over 80 articles in scientific journals and peer-reviewed conference proceedings and has 5 patents.

In 2012, she co-founded Emotient, a startup for automatic facial expression recognition, where she was the Lead Scientist.

Apple acquired Emotient in January 2016 after she spoke at our 2nd Annual LDV Vision Summit.

Dr. Regina Barzilay – a School of Engineering Distinguished Professor of AI & Health in the Department of Computer Science and the AI Faculty Lead at MIT Jameel Clinic. She develops machine learning methods for drug discovery and clinical AI. Her research has been recognized with the MacArthur Fellowship, an NSF Career Award, and the AAAI Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine.

Dr. Tamara Berg – Founder of AIAIO. Prior to that, she was Director at Meta AI. She is the recipient of an NSF Career award, 2 Google faculty awards, the 2013 Marr Prize, and the 2016 UNC Hettleman Award. Her research interests lie at the boundary of computer vision and natural language processing, specifically focused on understanding the connections between these two related modalities.

She judged the Entrepreneurial Computer Vision Challenge at our 1st Annual LDV Vision Summit and the Startup Competition at our 3rd Annual LDV Vision Summit.

Miranda Bogen – the founding director of the AI Governance Lab at the Center for Democracy & Technology.

An AI policy expert and responsible AI practitioner, Miranda has led work at the intersection of policy and AI fairness and governance in senior roles in industry and civil society. She served as co-chair of the Fairness, Transparency, and Accountability Working Group at the Partnership on AI, conducted foundational research at the intersection of machine learning and civil rights at Upturn, and most recently guided strategy and implementation of responsible AI practices at Meta.

Dr. Alexandra Boussommier – a biomedical engineer who has spent years doing research in laboratories, manipulating and observing tissues and cells through microscopes, and experiencing first-hand the lack of automation and quality control. She has authored or co-authored more than 10 publications in peer-reviewed journals and obtained prestigious fellowships (e.g. Cancer Research Institute, NYC; Marie Curie S&E fellowship, EU). After returning to Europe following her postdoc, she founded ImVitro. It’s one of our LDV portfolio companies.

Check out her keynote at our 9th Annual LDV Vision Summit.

Dr. Joy Buolamwini – best-selling author of "Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What is Human in a World of Machines". A poet of code who uses art & research to illuminate the social implications of AI. She founded the Algorithmic Justice League to create a world with more equitable and accountable technology.

She has been awarded the 2024 Digital Civil Rights Award by the NAACP and Archewell Foundation, the non-profit organization created by Prince Harry and Meghan, The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, in recognition of her advocacy for equitable and accountable AI.

Dr. Octavia Camps – a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Northeastern University.

Her research interests include robust computer vision, image processing, and machine learning. From 1991 to 2006, she was a faculty member at the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering at Pennsylvania State University.

Dr. Camps and her collaborators were awarded the Best Paper Award at the 2018 International Conference on Distributed Smart Cameras in Eindhoven.

Dr. Duygu Ceylan – a Senior Research Scientist at Adobe Research. She received the Eurographics PhD Award and the Eurographics Young Researcher Award. Before joining Adobe, she obtained her PhD degree from EPFL.

Her research interests include using machine learning techniques to infer and analyze 3D information from images and videos, focusing specifically on humans. Her work is at the intersection of computer vision and graphics where she looks for new methods to bridge the gap between 2D & 3D.

Dr. Anasua Chatterjee – a permanent faculty member at TU Delft and an Assistant Professor of the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen. Her focus has been on building and operating quantum hardware. Her research also involves feedback and control of delicate quantum systems, as well as engineering more complex devices and interactions. At our 9th Annual LDV Vision Summit, she spoke about the effective utilization of AI and machine learning tools to analyze visual data to accelerate the development of large-scale, usable quantum hardware.

Dr. Lydia Chilton – an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. Her focus of interest is human-computer interaction.

Her research views the design process from a computational standpoint. She is a part of the Computational Design Lab, a research group in the Computer Science Department of Columbia University, where she builds AI tools that enhance people’s productivity.

Check out our interview about AI-generated content for social media.

Dr. Rumman Chowdhury – United States Science Envoy for Artificial Intelligence appointed by the U.S. Department of State, AI Steering Committee Member in the City of New York, and Co-Founder & CEO at Humane Intelligence. She was named one of BBC’s 100 Women, recognized as one of the Bay Area’s top 40 under 40, and a member of the British Royal Society of the Arts. She has been named by Forbes as one of the Five Who Are Shaping AI in 2018.

She creates cutting-edge socio-technical solutions for ethical, explainable and transparent AI.

Dr. Rita Cucchiara – a Professor at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, where she is the Director of the Artificial Intelligence Research and Innovation Center, coordinating the AImageLab research lab and the Modena ELLIS Unit. Her research interests include computer vision, pattern recognition, and multimedia. She is a Member of IEEE.

Dr. Cucchiara received a Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research grant and the Maria Petrou Prize from the IAPR. Additionally, she served as the General Chair of ICPR2020.

Dr. Angela Dai – a Professor at TUM, heads the 3D AI Lab. Her research focuses on attaining a 3D understanding of the world around us, capturing and constructing semantically-informed 3D models of real-world environments. She employs generative 3D deep learning to facilitate interaction with 3D scenes for content creation and virtual or robotic agents.

Her achievements include a Eurographics Young Researcher Award, an ACM SIGGRAPH Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Honorable Mention, and a Stanford Graduate Fellowship.

Dr. Dima Damen – a Professor of Computer Vision at the University of Bristol, is currently an EPSRC Fellow (2020-2025). She is also a Senior Research Scientist at DeedMind. Her research focuses on the automatic understanding of object interactions, actions, and activities using wearable visual sensors, using various modalities including audio and 3D. She leads the EPIC-KITCHENS project, the seminal dataset in egocentric vision and contributed to the massive-scale Ego4D project and the newly introduced Ego-Exo4D dataset. Prof Damen served as program chair for ICCV 2021 and is Associate Editor in Chief for IEEE TPAMI.

Dr. Kristin Dana – a Professor at Rutgers University; Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Steg AI, and Director of Computer Vision and Robotics Lab, where she develops new methods in the application areas of precision agriculture, remote sensing, and socially cognizant robotics.

Her research interests include computer vision, robotics, AI, computational photography, and machine learning. She has received a $3M National Science Foundation Research Traineeship grant for her project, “SOCRATES: Socially Cognizant Robotics for a Technology Enhanced Society.”

Dr. Kate Darling – a Research Scientist at MIT Media Lab and leader of the Ethics & Society research team at the Boston Dynamics AI Institute. Her work explores the societal and legal implications of robotics. She’s the author of “The New Breed: What Our History with Animals Reveals about Our Future with Robots”. She investigates social robotics and explores the emotional connection between people and lifelike machines. See how Dr. Darling thinks we should approach our relationships with robots.

Dr. Tali Dekel – an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science, and a Staff Research Scientist at Google. Her main research interests include image and video analysis, multi-view systems, 3D structure and motion estimation, image synthesis and rendering. She was the first woman to receive the prestigious Eric and Sheila Samson Prime Minister's Prize for Innovation in Alternative Fuels and Smart Mobility.

Dr. Claire Delaunay – CTO at farm-ng. Before joining farm-ng, Claire served as Vice President of Engineering at NVIDIA, overseeing the Isaac robotics initiative. Leading a team, she successfully brought Isaac to the global market for roboticists and developers. Prior to that, Claire directed engineering at Uber following its acquisition of Otto, the startup she co-founded.

Claire brings 20 years of experience in robotics and autonomous vehicles.

Dr. Ilke Demir – a Senior Research Scientist at Intel, Inventor of FakeCatcher, and ACM Distinguished Speaker. Her research focuses on generative models for digitizing the real world, analysis and synthesis approaches in geospatial machine learning, and computational geometry for synthesis and fabrication. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Facebook/Meta. At our 8th Annual LDV Vision Summit, she spoke about geometric deep learning.

Dr. Deborah Estrin – a Professor of Computer Science and Associate Dean for Impact at Cornell Tech, focuses on caregiving technologies, immersive health, participatory sensing and more. She was the first ACM-W Athena Lecturer, received the Anita Borg Institute's Women of Vision Award for Innovation, joined the WITI Hall of Fame, and received an honorary doctorate from EPFL. Estrin is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering, and National Academy of Medicine; was chosen as a 2018 fellow of the MacArthur Foundation, and was named the 2022 recipient of the prestigious Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) John von Neumann Medal.

Dr. Sanja Fidler – an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, a co-founder of the Vector Institute, and VP of AI Research at NVIDIA, leading a research lab in Toronto. Her main research interests are in the intersection of computer vision and graphics, 3D vision, 3D reconstruction and synthesis; and interactive methods for image annotation.

Among Dr. Fidler's awards are the Connaught New Researcher Award, the NVIDIA Pioneers of AI Award, the Amazon Academic Research Award, and the Facebook Faculty Award. She served as Program Chair of ICCV 2021. She has also served as Area Chair of several computer vision conferences.

Dr. Chelsea Finn – an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Her lab, IRIS, studies intelligence through robotic interaction at scale and is affiliated with SAIL and the ML Group. Previously, Dr. Finn was a Research Scientist at Google Brain. She is interested in the capability of robots and other agents to develop broadly intelligent behavior through learning and interaction. Her work was featured in the New York Times and MIT Technology Review. She received the ACM 2018 Doctoral Dissertation Award, the MIT TR35 Pioneer Award, Intel's Rising Star Faculty Award, and the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship Award.

Dr. Kristen Fortney – Co-Founder & CEO at BioAge.
She earned her Ph.D. in Medical Biophysics from the University of Toronto, then pursued postdoctoral training at Stanford University as a fellow of the Ellison Medical Foundation / American Federation for Aging Research.
With over a decade of experience, she has developed innovative bioinformatics methods for data-driven exploration of aging and age-related diseases. She published 18 papers on computational drug discovery, aging biomarkers, and the genetics of human longevity. At our 9th Annual LDV Vision Summit, she explored "how and when deep tech will increase the longevity of humans."

Dr. Carolina Galleguillos – a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Google. Previously, she was a Director of Engineering, Computer Vision and Media Technology at Set Media Inc. (acquired by Conversant in 2014), developing computer vision algorithms for video content analysis.

She is particularly excited about developing and deploying machine learning algorithms to production that can bring value to startups, building teams and educating people about machine learning and computer vision.

Dr. Timnit Gebru – a pioneer in algorithmic bias and data mining, the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute. Previously, she's held roles with Google, Microsoft Research and Apple. She's also the co-founder of Black in AI.

At our 4th Annual LDV Vision Summit, she won the Entrepreneurial Computer Vision Challenge with her project, titled "Predicting Demographics Using 50 Million Images".

Check out her insights on algorithmic bias and ethics in data mining.

Dr. Molly Gibson – a Scientist Entrepreneur at Flagship Pioneering, working as part of a venture-creation team to found and grow companies at the intersection of biology and machine learning including Generate Biomedicines, Tessera Therapeutics, and Cobalt Biomedicines (merged into Sana Biotechnology). She serves as Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer of Generate Biomedicines. Before joining Flagship, she led computational biology at Kaleido Biosciences.

At our 10th Annual LDV Vision Summit, she discussed how AI is empowering & disrupting the discovery of proteins, biologics, therapeutics & materials.

Dr. Georgia Gkioxari – an Assistant Professor of Computing + Mathematical Sciences at Caltech and a William H. Hurt scholar. From 2016 to 2022, she was a research scientist at Meta, at FAIR.

She received the 2021 Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) Young Researcher Award given by the TCPAMI of the IEEE Computer Society. She also received the PAMI Mark Everingham Award for the Detectron Library Suite. Dr. Gkioxari was named one of 30 influential women advancing AI in 2019 by ReWork and was nominated for the Women in AI Awards in 2020 by VentureBeat.

Christina Gomez-Terry – Director of Operations at Plus One Robotics.

She specializes in robotics and machine vision, specifically in video/image processing. At our 6th Annual LDV Vision Summit, she spoke about human-robot collaboration that ensures scalable, flexible & fault-tolerant systems.

Previously, she programmed Kuka robots at SwRI. The major projects before that included working with Fanuc painting robots, doing path planning and programming, and programming a FactoryTalk View Site Edition HMI application.

Dr. Gaile Gordon has 20+ years of experience in computer vision-based products and R&D leadership. She has a proven track record of transitioning technology from R&D to production in both enterprise and consumer markets. Dr. Gordon Co-Founded TYZX to produce hardware for accelerated 3D cameras and computer vision applications for a variety of markets including security, robotics and automotive industries. TYZX was acquired by Intel and fueled their RealSense 3D technology products.

Gaile is an LDV Expert in Residence.

Check out our interview with Gaile.

Dr. Kristen Grauman – a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin and a Research Director in FAIR at Meta. Her research in computer vision and machine learning focuses on visual recognition, video and embodied perception. She is an IEEE Fellow, AAAS Fellow, AAAI Fellow, Sloan Fellow, and recipient of the 2013 Computers and Thought Award. She and her collaborators have been recognized with several Best Paper awards in computer vision, including a 2011 Marr Prize and a 2017 Helmholtz Prize (test of time award). She has served as Associate Editor-in-Chief for PAMI and Program Chair of CVPR 2015, NeurIPS 2018 and ICCV 2023.

Deirdre Hanford – Chief Executive Officer and Trustee at Natcast. She leads the company to fulfill its mission of advancing U.S. semiconductor R&D innovation and leadership, working in concert with the Department of Commerce and the U.S. semiconductor ecosystem. Before that, she was Synopsys’s 8th employee. In 2008, she was Chairman of the American Electronics Association.

She received the Domenico A. Iolanta Award from Brown University for her senior year team research project, the Marie Pistilli Award and the YWCA Tribute to Women and Industry (TWIN) Award.

Dr. Alex Hanna – Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute. Her work centers on the data used in new computational technologies, and how these data exacerbate racial, gender and class inequality.

She serves as a Senior Fellow at the Center for Applied Transgender Studies and sits on the advisory board for the Human Rights Data Analysis Group and the Scholars Council for the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry.

Dr. Hanna is the recipient of the Wisconsin Alumni Association's Forward Award.

Dr. Kim Hazelwood – Senior Director of Engineering and Research at Meta. Her roles at Meta have included multiple engineering leadership roles across AI Infrastructure and AI Research. Before that, Kim held positions at Yahoo Labs, Google, Intel and the University of Virginia.

Dr. Hazelwood has authored over 50 publications and one book. She received the MIT "Top 35 Innovators under 35" award, the ACM SIGPLAN "Test of Time" Award, the Anita Borg Early Career Award, and an NSF Career Award. She serves on the Board of Directors for the Computing Research Association.

Dr. Judy Hoffman – an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing, a member of the Machine Learning Center, and the Co-Founder of the "Women in Computer Vision" group. Her research focuses on domain adaptation, transfer learning, adversarial robustness and algorithmic fairness. She received the NSF CAREER award, PAMI Distinguished Young Researcher Award, Google Research Scholar Award, Samsung AI Researcher of the Year Award and the NVIDIA Female Leader in Computer Vision Award. She is one of AIMiner's top 100 most influential scholars in Machine Learning.

Dr. Fiona Hua – Director of Autonomy Perception at May Mobility. She is leading the revolutionary transformation of the perception technology at May Mobility to support Safer AV solutions.

Before that, she built the AI & Data team at Sea Machines and led the first AI-powered perception product from container ships to work boats. Prior to this, she led the R&D work on face identification & face liveness detection for products that are used globally in Border Control, Law Enforcement, and Commercial Banks.

Dr. Mary Lou Jepsen – Founder and CEO of OpenWater, a startup working on novel imaging systems that leverage lasers as well as optoelectronic & holographic systems to see deep into the body and brain with the detail of a high-resolution 3D camera.

Previously, she was a Co-Founder of OLPC, and an Executive at Google, Meta, Oculus and Intel.

At our 9th Annual LDV Vision Summit, she shared insights on how to make moonshots into moon landings & other tales in deep tech entrepreneurism.

Amba Kak – Executive Director, at AI Now Institute at New York University. She leads on advancing diagnosis and actionable policy recommendations to tackle concerns with artificial intelligence and concentrated power.

Amba recently completed her term as Senior Advisor on AI at the Federal Trade Commission. Prior to AI Now, she was a Global Policy Advisor at Mozilla; and also previously served as legal advisor to India’s telecommunications regulator (TRAI) on net-neutrality rules.

Dr. Rana Kaliouby – a serial entrepreneur, scientist and investor. Former Co-Founder and CEO of Affectiva; the company was acquired by Smart Eye, where she was focused on scaling the company to a global AI powerhouse. Author of the book “Girl Decoded.” She is a Trustee at the Boston Museum of Science, Milton Academy and the American University in Cairo. She has been recognized on Fortune’s 40 Under 40, Forbes' Top 50 Women in Tech & Boston Globe’s Top 50 Tech Power Players. Check out her insights on bringing emotional intelligence to our digital world.

Dr. Jayashree Kalpathy-Cramer – Director of the QTIM lab and the Center for Machine Learning at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging and an associate professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School. Chief of the Division of Artificial Medical Intelligence in Ophthalmology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. She translates novel artificial intelligence methods into effective patient care practices at the Sue Anschutz-Rodgers Eye Center. She was among the RSNA’s 2020 Council of Distinguished Investigators.

Dr. Angjoo Kanazawa – an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

She leads the Kanazawa AI Research lab under BAIR, known for its notable work on Human Mesh Recovery for 4D human perception and nerf.studio, a popular open-source project for 3D capture.

Dr. Kanazawa's research has been recognized with various awards, including a Sloan Fellowship. She also serves on the advisory boards of Wonder Dynamics and Luma AI.

Deborah Dormah Kanubala – Co-Organizer for the WiMLDS Accra-Ghana chapter and the Co-Founder of WPSYG. She is a Ph.D. student at Saarland University, Germany in the Probabilistic Machine Learning group of Prof. Dr. Isabel Valera. Her Ph.D. Research is focused on Developing Fair machine-learning models. Prior to this, she worked as an NLP Engineer at Proto and also lectured at Academic City University. Ms. Kanubala is a recipient of several grants and scholarships including the Mastercard Foundation Scholar grant, Alumnode Project grant, and many more. She was voted among the 100 Most Influential People (STEM Category) in 2019.

Nour Karessli – an Applied Science Manager at Zalando. She leads research efforts on building and productionizing personalized machine learning models utilizing state-of-the-art AI techniques to provide customers with tailored fashion inspiration and recommendations. She holds a Master's degree in Computer Science focused on machine learning and computer vision from Saarland University – Max Planck Institute for Informatics. Besides her main role, she’s on the organizing committee of Zalando Data Science Community (DSC) and Zalando Women in Tech Employee Resource Group (ZWT ERG). We discussed the future of online shopping and digital fashion.

Dr. Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman – Principal Scientist at Google, a Professor of Computer Science at the Allen School, Director of the UW Reality Lab and our LDV Expert. Her research is in computer vision and computer graphics with a focus on Generative AI. She was awarded the Google faculty award, Madrona prize, GeekWire Innovation of the Year Award, covers of CACM and SIGGRAPH, the best student paper honorable mention at CVPR, and the best demo runner-up MobiSys. At our 4th Annual LDV Vision Summit, she spoke about how and why she evolved her research into a company called Dreambit which she then sold to Facebook/Meta.

Dr. Heidy Khlaaf – Former Engineering Director at the cybersecurity firm Trail of Bits. She specializes in the evaluation, specification and verification of complex or autonomous software implementations in safety-critical systems, ranging from UAVs to large nuclear power plants. She is a recipient of the prestigious NSF GRFP award. Her work focuses on the temporal verification, termination and non-termination of infinite-state software systems. She has won the best paper award at CAV 2015, and a subsequent invitation to JACM, for her work on the first automated algorithm to verify CTL* verification for infinite-state systems.

Dr. Daphne Koller – Founder and CEO of Insitro, Co-Founder of Coursera, Adjunct Computer Science Professor at Stanford. She has received numerous honors and awards.

Daphne was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering and elected a fellow of the American Association for AI, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the International Society of Computational Biology. Her teaching excellence was acknowledged with the Stanford Medal for Excellence in Fostering Undergraduate Research and as a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education.

Dr. Jana Kosecka – a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University, where her research explores computer vision and robotics. She focuses on 'seeing' systems engaged in autonomous tasks and the acquisition of static and dynamic models of environments using visual sensors and human-computer interaction. Prof. Kosecka has published over 100 publications and co-authored a monograph titled “Invitation to 3D Vision: From Images to Geometric Models”. She has held visiting positions at Stanford University, Google and Nokia Research. Prof. Kosecka has received the Marr Prize in Computer Vision and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

Dr. Adriana Kovashka – an Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh.

Her research interests lie in computer vision and machine learning. Her work has been published in CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, International Journal of Computer Vision, NeurIPS, AAAI, and ACL.

She has received numerous prestigious awards for her outstanding contributions to the field.

Prof. Kovashka served as area chair for CVPR 2018-2021 and will serve as ICCV 2025 program co-chair.

Dr. Sarah Kreps – a Professor of Government at Cornell University, Adjunct Professor of Law at Cornell Law School and an Adjunct Scholar at West Point’s Modern War Institute. She focuses on emerging technologies, national security and International politics. Dr. Kreps’ recent research explores the potential and risks of AI tech such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, specifically in the political sphere.

She has written seven books (published or forthcoming) on the intersection of technology, international politics and national security. Her research and insights are frequently featured in international media outlets such as the New York Times, BBC, Financial Times, CNBC, and CNN.

Dr. Yamuna Krishnan – a Professor in Chemistry at the University of Chicago, an expert in biological nanotechnology. Her research helped discover that DNA nanodevices could function inside a living cell. The team of researchers in Krishnan’s lab is working to gain a better understanding of the structure and dynamics of unusual forms of nucleic acids. She has received numerous awards, including the Infosys Prize for Physical Sciences and the Bhatnagar Award for Chemical Sciences. She won the NIH Directors Pioneer Award in 2022.

At our 6th Annual LDV Vision Summit, she spoke about DNA nanotechnology to image cells and diagnose disease early.

Dr. Hilde Kühne – a Professor of Computer Vision and Multimodal Learning at the University of Bonn and an affiliated professor at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.

Her research focuses on video understanding, particularly learning without labels and multimodal video understanding. Her dataset HMDB51 was awarded the ICCV Helmholtz Prize and the PAMI Mark Everingham Prize. Additionally, she serves as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, as Program Chair for WACV 2024, and as area chair for various conferences including CVPR, ICCV, and WACV.

Apeksha Kumavat – Co-Founder & Chief Engineer at Gatik. She is an expert in building full-stack solutions for self-driving cars. Apeksha is responsible for the development of Gatik’s autonomous technology and the safe deployment of Gatik’s fully driverless trucks with Fortune 500 customers including Walmart, Pitney Bowes, Georgia-Pacific, KBX and Loblaw.

Listed in Inc.'s 2022 Female Founders 100, she also earned recognition in the 2022 Automotive News Rising Stars list and Silicon Valley Business Journal's 40 under 40. At our 6th Annual LDV Vision Summit, she spoke about autonomous vehicles transforming urban logistics.

Dr. Svetlana Lazebnik – a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The main themes of her research include scene understanding, joint modeling of images and text, large-scale photo collections, and machine learning techniques for visual recognition problems.

Prof. Lazebnik has secured numerous grants and received the Amazon Research Award, the AWS Machine Learning Research Award, the Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, the Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the Google Research Award, ARO, and Adobe.

Dr. Laura Leal-Taixé – a Senior Research Manager at NVIDIA. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor at the Technical University of Munich, where she led the Dynamic Vision and Learning group. She conducts research in the area of Computer Vision and Machine Learning. In particular, she focuses on video analysis, solving tasks such as multiple object tracking, motion analysis, or semantic segmentation.

Dr. Leal-Taixé has received prestigious awards including the Sofja Kovalevskaja Award in 2017, the Google Faculty Award in 2021, and the ERC Starting Grant in 2022.

Claire Leibowicz – the Head of the AI and Media Integrity Program at the Partnership on AI, a multistakeholder nonprofit group backed by Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and others committed to the responsible deployment of AI technology. She also oversees PAI’s AI and media integrity steering committee. In 2021, Claire was a journalism fellow at Tablet Magazine, and in 2022, she was a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center focused on AI governance.

She has advised companies, governments, and nonprofit organizations on AI governance, generative media and digital information.

Dr. Sophie Lebrecht – COO of the Allen Institute for AI. Her work centers around demystifying the models at the heart of the Generative AI boom, which she thinks will be crucial for measuring the safety of AI models as governments debate AI regulations.

Sophie’s work has been recognized for innovation, winning the World Economic Forum’s Tech Pioneers Award, the Edison Award for Innovation, and Fast Company’s Most Creative in Business, and her work has been featured in the New York Times, The White House blog, Forbes, Dow Jones, and The Wall Street Journal amongst others.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li – the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, Co-Director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute, and Author of the book “The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI”. She is currently building a spatial intelligence startup. Her research interests include cognitively inspired AI, machine learning, computer vision, robotic learning, and AI+healthcare. Dr. Li was named in the Time 100 AI Most Influential People list in 2023 and received the Intel Lifetime Achievements Innovation Award for her contributions to AI.

Dr. Jia Li – Co-Founder, Chief AI Officer & President of LiveX AI. She is elected as IEEE Fellow for Leadership in Large Scale AI. She co-taught the inaugural course of Generative AI and Medicine at Stanford University, where she served multiple roles including Adjunct Professor. She was the Founding Global Head of R&D at Google Cloud AI. She led the OPTIMOL team to victory in the first Semantic Robotics Vision Challenge and was recognized as a WEF Young Global Leader. She received the Longuet-Higgins Prize and, jointly with MIT, her team won the 2020 IEEE Low Power Image Recognition Challenge.

Dr. Yuanzhen Li – a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google. At Google Research, she supports a talented team and a few cross-team Computer Vision and Generative AI efforts. Before Google, she spent a decade building startups. She developed iOS computational photography apps and one of them (TrueHDR) gained massive popularity in 2009-2012.

She also founded a startup leveraging deep learning for image search. This startup was acquired by VSCO in 2015 and Yuanzhen worked at VSCO as a Director of Engineering. She spoke about it at our 3rd Annual LDV Vision Summit.

Dr. Michal Lipson – the Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University and a member of the National Academy of Science. Her research work is focused on nanophotonics. She pioneered critical building blocks in the field of Silicon Photonics, which is recognized as one of the most promising directions for solving the major bottlenecks in microelectronics. She was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship and named by Thomson Reuters as a top 1% most highly cited researcher in the field of Physics.

See her insights on silicon photonics and its ability to enable AI.

Dr. Karen Liu – a Professor at Stanford University's Computer Science Department. Dr. Liu previously taught at Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing. Her research spans computer graphics and robotics, focusing on physics-based animation, optimal control and computational biomechanics.

She's recognized with awards including a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the ACM SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award. In 2021, Dr. Liu was inducted to ACM SIGGRAPH Academy.

Dr. Xiao Ma – a Machine Learning Research Engineer at Google. She currently works on Large Language Model safety & human-ML collaboration. Her prior research focuses on understanding how AI increasingly mediates social exchange and its societal impact on trust. At our 6th Annual LDV Vision Summit, she spoke about “understanding image quality and trust in peer-to-peer marketplaces.”

Previously, Dr. Ma worked at Facebook Core Data Science on trust in social groups and Airbnb on trust in host profiles.

Tlamelo Tamaki Makati – a Ph.D. Researcher at TU Dublin Computer Science working on inclusive AI. Her current project looks at the impact of artificial intelligence/machine learning in the Digital Accessibility Landscape. She is also a Research Lead at AntonTech, an agri-tech startup that uses machine learning, deep learning, and drones to address agricultural problems within Africa and the world. She serves as a Co-Organizer of Women in Machine Learning and Data Science (WiMLDS) in Gaborone, Botswana.

Dr. Mackenzie Mathis – an Assistant Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne working within the Brain Mind Institute & AI Center. Dr. Mathis founded the Laboratory of Adaptive Intelligence to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying adaptive behavior, and to develop machine-learning methods that, collectively, aim to inform translational research. She holds the Bertarelli Foundation Chair of Integrative Neuroscience.

See her insights on the interplay between biological intelligence & AI.

Krystal Maughan – a Ph.D. Researcher (2019-2025) investigating post-quantum isogeny-based cryptography.

Her work is between the Maths and Computer Science departments (mostly on Computational Arithmetic Geometry / Number Theory / Mathematical Cryptography relating to Quantum Computing).

Previously, she published research on provable fairness and privacy in Machine Learning and collaborated on optimal-flow routing problems.

Dr. Milagros Miceli – a sociologist and computer scientist investigating how ground-truth data for machine learning is produced.

Dr. Miceli leads the research group Data, Algorithmic Systems, and Ethics at Weizenbaum-Institut, where she examines the precarious work conditions of the clickworkers who train AI.

She also works as a researcher at DAIR Institute where she is thinking through ways of engaging communities of data workers in AI research.

Dr. Stefanie Milam – James Webb Space Telescope Deputy Project Scientist for Planetary Science at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. She is an expert in rotational spectroscopy, observations, and laboratory modeling of astrochemistry and molecular astrophysics of the interstellar medium, evolved stars, star formation regions, and comets.

Asteroid 40704 (1999 RO240) was named for Milam in recognition of her efforts to ensure solar system science with JWST was possible. At our 8th Annual LDV Vision Summit, Dr. Milam discussed cutting-edge visual tech driving the next frontier in space.

Nyalleng Moorosi is a Senior Researcher at DAIR. Her research interests lie in understanding how we can build AI models that center populations often regarded as peripheral. Before joining DAIR, she was a Research Software Engineer at Google and a senior researcher at the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, where she collaborated closely with government and academic institutions to develop a variety of products for both private and public sectors.

Outside of formal work, she co-founded the Deep Learning Indaba and has been an active member of the A+ Alliance.

Mira Murati – CTO at OpenAI, leading the teams behind DALL-E, which utilizes AI to generate artwork based on prompts, and ChatGPT, the widely popular AI chatbot capable of answering complex questions with human-like skill.

Prior to her role at OpenAI, she worked for Zodiac Aerospace before joining Tesla in 2013, where she served as a Product Manager on the Model X. From 2016 until joining OpenAI in 2018, she was employed at the augmented reality startup Leap Motion (now Ultraleap).

Mira was featured in Time's 2023 list of 100 Next Rising Leaders across industries.

Dr. Naila Murray – Director, AI Research at Meta. She is also an Advisory Council Member of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University.

Her research interests include fine-grained visual categorization and search, visual attention and image aesthetics analysis. Currently, her research focuses on image search and video action recognition.

Previously, she served as area chair for ICLR 2018, ICCV 2019, ICLR 2019, CVPR 2020, ECCV 2020, and program chair for ICLR 2021.

Dr. Elizabeth Neumann – an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Davis. Her lab focuses on understanding the molecular and cellular architecture behind neurological diseases. The research is highly interdisciplinary and involves developing analytical tools and multimodal imaging methods for understanding complex biological phenomena. Dr. Neumann has expertise in single-cell mass spectral analysis and 3D imaging mass spectrometry.

At our 10th Annual LDV Vision Summit, she discussed how visual tech advancements in life sciences & biotech are paving the way for longer and healthier lives.

Mutale Nkonde – the founding CEO of the nonprofit AI For the People, aimed at amplifying Black voices in the tech industry. She is the leading advocate of the Algorithmic Accountability Act, which was first introduced to the House of Representatives in 2019. It established AI for the People as a key thought leader around how to develop protocols to guide the design, deployment and governance of AI systems that comply with local nondiscrimination laws. Currently, she serves as a Visiting Policy Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute.

In 2019, she co-authored the report called Advancing Racial Literacy in Tech.

Dr. Safiya Noble – a Professor & Co-Founder of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2), Interim Director of UCLA DataX Data Science/Studies, Faculty Director and Founder of the Center on Race & Digital Justice.

Her work focuses on the intersection of technology and human rights as she tries to protect vulnerable communities from the effects of AI and the ways it can exacerbate inequities like racism and sexism.

She is the author of "Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism."

Dr. Elaine O. Nsoesie – an Associate Professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health.

Previously, she led the Racial Data Tracker project at Boston University's Center for Antiracist Research and served as a program lead and a senior advisor to the Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Consortium to Advance Health Equity and Researcher Diversity program at the National Institutes of Health.

She is on the organizing committee of Data Science Africa and the advisory board of the Data Scientists Network.

Dr. Amaka Okafor – a postdoctoral Appointee at Argonne National Laboratory. Her research integrates novel data analytics techniques and artificial intelligence solutions to enhance the reliability and efficiency of High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems operations. She has received several awards from notable organizations including Google and Microsoft in recognition of her outstanding research in Computer Science as well as her efforts towards supporting women and girls in STEM. Recently, her work was listed as one of the top 80 women-led AI research transforming Africa and the world in general.

Salomey Osei – a Research Assistant at DeustoTech, an ML Researcher at Masakhane and a Research Lead of unsupervised methods for Ghana NLP. Salomey enrolled in the Ph.D. program Engineering for the Information Society and Sustainable Development at the University of Deusto. Her research project aims to develop innovative AI solutions to deal with the challenges of the transportation sector and enhance its decision-making processes to pave the way towards more sustainable transportation. She’s been involved with Black in AI, Women in Machine Learning and Women in Machine Learning and Data Science as a co-organizer.

Dr. Sarah Ostadabbas – an Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, the Director of the Augmented Cognition Laboratory, and the Director of Women In Engineering (WIE) at the College of Engineering at Northeastern University.

Dr. Ostadabbas received the Sony Faculty Innovation Award for her project titled “Live Stream Temporally Embedded 3D Human Body Pose and Shape Estimation.”

At our 9th Annual LDV Vision Summit, she presented an AI-powered infant monitoring platform that tracks infants' movements, poses, and development using advanced computer vision technology, ensuring their safety and growth.

Dr. Karen Panetta – an electrical and computer engineer, inventor and Dean of Graduate Education for the School of Engineering at Tufts University. Her research areas include AI, machine learning, automated systems, simulation and visual sensing systems. Karen is a world-recognized champion for developing diversity and inclusion initiatives. She has numerous awards including the National Science Foundation (NSF) Presidential (PAESMEM) Award, awarded by U.S. President Barack Obama and received the inaugural IEEE Ethical Practices Award. She was named one of the top 5 people in AI for sustainability by Business Insider.

We discussed with Karen the magic of engineering and computer science.

Dr. Helen Papagiannis – Heralded as an Augmented Reality (AR) pioneer shaping the next wave of computing, her groundbreaking contributions date back to 2005. She is the author of the best-selling book “Augmented Human: How Technology Is Shaping The New Reality” and her TEDx talk was featured among the Top 10 Talks on AR. She is the former Chief Innovation Officer at Infinity Augmented Reality Inc. (acquired by Alibaba) and was a Senior Research Associate at York University’s Augmented Reality Lab. Her work has been featured across billboards in Times Square in New York City, in Louis Vuitton store windows worldwide, and in publications such as WIRED, The New York Times, and Fast Company. See her insights on the future of content in our 2021 LDV Insights report.

Dr. Devi Parikh –previously Senior Director, Generative AI at Meta, an Associate Professor at Georgia Tech and a Generative Artist.

She received several awards including a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, an IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Sigma Xi Young Faculty Award at Georgia Tech, an Allen Distinguished Investigator Award in AI, 4 Google Faculty Research Awards, an Amazon Academic Research Award, a Lockheed Martin Inspirational Young Faculty Award, an Outstanding New Assistant Professor Award, a Rowan University Medal of Excellence for Alumni Achievement, Rowan University's 40 under 40 recognition, and more.

Dr. Viorica Patraucean – a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. She collaborates with machine learning and neuroscience experts to create artificial agents with human-level intelligence.

At our 5th Annual LDV Vision Summit, she spoke about her work on massively parallel video nets and how it’s relevant for real-world low-latency/low-power applications.

Previously, she was a research associate within CSIC, working mainly on designing and applying state-of-the-art machine learning techniques for geometric and semantic modeling of large-scale outdoor structures.

Dr. Nonny de la Peña –Founding Director of Arizona State University’s Narrative and Emerging Media Center based in Downtown L.A. She was named WSJ Technology Innovator of the Year. CEO of Emblematic Group. A Wired Magazine #MakeTechHuman Agent of Change, she has been called “The Godmother of Virtual Reality” by Engadget and The Guardian. Additionally, Fast Company named her “One of the People Who Made the World More Creative” and CNET featured her in the top 20 Most Influential Latinos in Tech for her work in immersive storytelling. At our 4th Annual LDV Vision Summit, she spoke about how her company delivers immersive journalism to tell stories that hopefully make a difference and inspire people to care.

Dr. Claudia Perlich – SVP of Strategic Data Science at Two Sigma. Since 2011, Claudia has also worked as an adjunct professor teaching Data Mining in the M.B.A. program at the New York University Stern School of Business. Previously, she served as Chief Scientist at Dstillery. Before that, she spent 6 years in the Predictive Modeling Group at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. Her research focuses on practical applications of Machine Learning and Data Mining.

At our 2nd Annual LDV Vision Summit, she discussed how data science can evaluate why some advertising creative content resonates more than others.

Rosalind Picard – a Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, Founder and Director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab, and Co-Founder of the startups Affectiva and Empatica.

She has received numerous prestigious honors including being named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2005, elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2019, recognized as a Fellow of the ACM in 2021, elected to the National Academy of Inventors in 2021, and awarded the International Lombardy Prize for Computer Science Research in 2022.

Dr. Joelle Pineau – VP of AI Research at Meta and a Professor at McGill University's School of Computer Science. She co-directs the Reasoning and Learning Lab and is a core academic member of Mila, holding a Canada CIFAR AI chair. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Machine Learning Research. She founded two startups that develop robotic assistants for the elderly; the SmartWheeler initiative and the Nursebot platform. Recognitions include NSERC's E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship, Fellow of AAAI, Senior Fellow of CIFAR, member of the Royal Society of Canada's College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists, and recipient of the Governor General's Innovation Awards.

Dr. Leila Pirhaji – the founder and CEO at ReviveMed, an award-winning, AI-based metabolomic platform for precision medicine. Previously, she worked at leading research institutes, including ETH Zurich, and major pharmaceutical companies like Merck and Takeda Pharmaceuticals. Her pioneering work has earned several prestigious awards and has been featured in various TV and media outlets. In 2019, she delivered a TED talk on the medical applications of AI and metabolomics, which has garnered nearly 2 million views. In 2020, MIT Technology Review recognized her as one of the top 35 innovators under 35 for her innovative AI-based technology to identify metabolites.

Dr. Frida Polli – Founder of Rosalind Ventures and Founder and CEO of Alethia, was previously CEO of Pymetrics, a talent-matching platform acquired by Harver.

At our 7th Annual LDV Vision Summit, Frida spoke about talent matching with AI.

Dr. Polli has appeared on lists including Inc's Female Founders 100, Entrepreneur's 100 Powerful Women, Fortune's Most Powerful Women NextGen, and HRE's Top 100 HR Tech Influencers. She has also won awards such as the MIT 100K Entrepreneurship Competition and Harvard Business School Life Science Award.

Carol Reiley – a serial entrepreneur and computer scientist known as the “Mother of Robots.” Her 20 years of academic expertise and industry experience lay in AI and robotics with applications in medical space, space exploration, disaster rescue and much more. She worked for Intuitive Surgical, Lockheed Martin and General Electric. She co-founded Drive.ai, a startup that was acquired by Apple. Reiley founded DeepMusic.ai, is a creative advisor and collaborator for the San Francisco Symphony, and is a brand spokesmodel for Guerlain Cosmetics. She is also a published author of the children’s book “Making a Splash” in addition to her dozen scientific publications and 8+ patents. We discussed robotics.

Dr. Elisa Ricci – an Associate Professor at the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Trento and the Head of the Research Unit Deep Visual Learning at Fondazione Bruno Kessler. Her research lies at the intersection of computer vision, deep learning and robotics perception. She has co-authored over 200 scientific publications, regularly appearing in top-tier journals and conferences in computer vision.

Dr. Ricci is the technical coordinator of the EU project PRECRISIS. She is the Program Chair of ECCV 2024 and a Fellow of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems.

Rashida Richardson – Senior counsel at Mastercard, her focus encompasses legal matters concerning privacy, data protection, and AI.

Formerly the director of policy research at the AI Now Institute, a research institute studying the social implications of AI, and a senior policy advisor for data and democracy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Richardson has served as an assistant professor of law and political science at Northeastern University since 2021, specializing in race and emerging technologies.

Dr. Anna Rohrbach – a Full Professor of “Multimodal Grounded Learning” at TU Darmstadt and hessian.AI (Germany). Her research is at the intersection of vision, language, and AI, spanning topics such as automatic visual captioning, text-to-image synthesis, and multimodal fact-checking. Her interests include building explainable models, addressing bias, and developing models that learn from language advice.

Dr. Rohrbach has been awarded the DAGM German Pattern Recognition Award 2023 and a €2M LOEWE Start Professorship from the state of Hesse.

Dr. Olga Russakovsky – an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Princeton University. Her research is in computer vision, closely integrated with the fields of machine learning, human-computer interaction and fairness, accountability and transparency. She received the PAMI Young Researcher Award, the NSF CAREER award, the AnitaB.org's Emerging Leader Abie Award in honor of Denice Denton, the CRA-WP Anita Borg Early Career Award, the MIT Technology Review's 35-under-35 Innovator award, the PAMI Everingham Prize and the Foreign Policy Magazine's 100 Leading Global Thinkers award. She co-founded the AI4ALL nonprofit.

Dr. Suchi Saria – Founder, CEO and Chief Scientific Officer of Bayesian Health, a John C. Malone Endowed Chair and tenured Professor at The Johns Hopkins University and Seed Investor to 15+ AI companies. She has been recognized as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, a Sloan Research Fellow, a DARPA Young Faculty Award recipient, Modern Healthcare's Top 25 Innovators, Rock Health's Top 50 in Digital Health, and one of the MIT Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35.

She is passionate about advancing the frontiers of AI and healthcare and empowering clinicians and patients with data-driven insights and interventions.

Raesetje Sefala – an AI Research Fellow at the Distributed AI Research (DAIR) institute. Her research focuses on creating ground truth datasets and using machine learning and other computational social science techniques to study the effects of spatial apartheid in South Africa, post-Apartheid. Her previous work involved using machine learning techniques to study poverty and traffic safety in the urban parts of Nigeria and Jakarta, respectively. She is also the co-founder of ACVSS, a computer vision summer school that aims to unite African students with leading experts, teaching them fundamental principles, ethical considerations and cutting-edge techniques.

Mírian Silva - AI Engineer at IBM Research, currently working on Foundation Models and Generative AI.

With a background in Computational Mathematics, her research has focused on Ethics in AI, with the main topics of interest being fairness, privacy, and trustworthy AI. Completely involved in actions that promote women in STEM and initiatives that increase the presence of Black and Latinx people in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

Previous Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Algorithms and Inequality Research Group.

Dr. Laura Smoliar – an expert in biotech & life science. In 2005, Laura founded Mobius Photonics, which developed high-power fiber-based UV and green lasers and was acquired by IPG Photonics. In 2016, Smoliar co-founded the Berkeley Catalyst Fund, where she made several early-stage biotech investments. In 2023, she became the inaugural Executive Director of the Taiwan Science & Technology Hub at Stanford University. She is also an Expert with us at LDV Capital.

At our 10th Annual LDV Vision Summit, she discussed how visual tech advancements in life sciences & biotech are paving the way for longer and healthier lives.

Irene Solaiman – the Head of Global Policy at Hugging Face, where she conducts social impact research and leads public policy efforts. Irene also sits on the Policy Steering Committee of the Partnership on AI and serves on the AI Governance Lab Advisory Committee at the Center for Democracy and Technology. She provides guidance to responsible AI initiatives at the OECD and IEEE. Previously, Irene initiated and led bias and social impact research at OpenAI. Her research focuses on AI value alignment, responsible releases and combating misuse and malicious use. Irene has been recognized on the MIT Tech Review's list of 35 Innovators Under 35 and is one of 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics.

Dr. Shannon Stott – the d'Arbeloff Mass General Research Scholar at Mass General Hospital and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She is also an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Her background is in optics, microfluidics and tissue engineering with a specific focus on how they are applied to clinical medicine. The Stott Laboratory has focused on developing microfluidic devices to isolate rare circulating cancer biomarkers from the blood of cancer patients.

Check out her keynote from our 9th Annual LDV Vision Summit.

Stacey Svetlichnaya – AI Engineer for Climate and Alignment. Most recently, the first Deep Learning Engineer at Weights & Biases, the developer platform for reproducible, transparent, and collaborative AI. Her past research includes image aesthetic quality and style classification, environmental monitoring from satellite, and emoji understanding. She has worked on image search and automating content discovery and recommendation on Flickr following an acquisition by Yahoo. Now consulting and building open-source AI tools for human agency and flourishing at AI Objectives Institute.

Dr. Leila Takayama – VP of Design and HRI at Robust AI, HRI Consultant at Hoku Labs and Oceankind. She is a Human-Robot Interaction specialist in the psychology of people's interactions with robotic products and services. She has over a decade of professional experience in applying social science concepts and methods to the design of robotic systems.

Dr. Takayama has published over 60 peer-reviewed conference and journal papers; patented inventions; and received early career awards from the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society, World Economic Forum, and MIT Technology Review (TR35).

Dr. Tang Siyu – an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zürich. She leads the Computer Vision and Learning Group at the Institute of Visual Computing. Her research focuses on computer vision and machine learning, specializing in perceiving and modeling humans.

She has received numerous honors and awards, including being an Outstanding Paper Finalist for Physical Human-Robot Interaction at ICRA, a Best Paper Award Finalist at CVPR, the Best Paper Award at 3DV, the ELLIS Ph.D. Award, the DAGM MVTec Dissertation Award, and the Best Paper Award at BMVC.

Dr. Flora Tasse – Principal ML Engineer at NVIDIA. She previously was an Applied Scientist (Machine Learning) at Cruise. She also co-founded Selerio (acquired by Streem). Before that, she worked on various projects including crowd simulations, sketch-based terrain modeling interfaces and curve-based shading.

Her expertise lies in AI for Computer Graphics and Vision.

Dr. Tasse's research focuses on data-driven methods for semantic-aware scene understanding, 3D modeling, content-based shape retrieval, and sketch-based interfaces.

Dr. Tatiana Tommasi – an Associate Professor at the Control and Computer Engineering department at the Polytechnic of Turin and serves as the director of the ELLIS Unit in Turin. Before her current position, she was an assistant professor at Sapienza University in Rome, Italy. Tatiana’s publication record boasts over 50 papers in top conferences and journals specializing in machine learning and computer vision.

She pioneered the field of transfer learning in computer vision and has extensive experience in domain adaptation, generalization, multimodal learning, and open-set learning. Her work has been acknowledged with several awards and honors.

Dr. Olga Troyanskaya – Director of Princeton Precision Health, Professor at Princeton University and Deputy Director for Genomics at the Flatiron Institute of the Simons Foundation.

She is a fellow of the ACM and among her honors and awards are the 2014 Ira Herskowitz Award from the Genetic Society of America, the 2011 Overton Prize, from the International Society of Computational Biology, and the 2011 Blavatnik Award For Young Scientists (Finalist Award).

At our 10th Annual LDV Vision Summit, she discussed how visual tech advancements in life sciences & biotech are paving the way for longer and healthier lives.

Dr. Tinne Tuytelaars – a Professor at KU Leuven, Belgium. Her primary interests revolve around computer vision, with a particular focus on image representations, vision and language, continual learning, dynamic architectures and related fields. She has held notable positions such as program chair for ECCV14 and CVPR21, as well as general chair for CVPR16. Additionally, she served as associate editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and was a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Computer Vision.

Her achievements include receiving an ERC Starting Grant in 2009, an ERC Advanced Grant in 2021, and being honored with the Koenderink test-of-time award at ECCV16.

Dr. Raquel Urtasun – Founder and CEO of Waabi, a Professor at the University of Toronto and Co-Founder of the Vector Institute for AI. Formerly, she served as Chief Scientist and Head of R&D at Uber ATG. She held the Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning and Computer Vision and was an Assistant Professor at Toyota Technological Institute in Chicago. She's received numerous awards including an NSERC EWR Steacie Award, NVIDIA Pioneers of AI Award, and Ministry of Education and Innovation Early Researcher Award. She was named Chatelaine 2018 Woman of the Year and one of Toronto's top influencers by Adweek magazine.

At our 4th Annual LDV Vision Summit, she spoke about how autonomous vehicles with human perception will make our cities smarter and better to live in.

Dr. Gül Varol – a Permanent Researcher in the IMAGINE team at Ecole des Ponts ParisTech. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford (VGG). Her thesis received the PhD awards from ELLIS and AFRIF. During her PhD, she spent time at MPI, Adobe, and Google.

She regularly serves as an Area Chair at major computer vision conferences and will serve as a Program Chair at ECCV'24. She has co-organized a number of workshops at CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, and NeurIPS.

Her research interests cover vision and language applications, including video representation learning, human motion synthesis, and sign languages.

Dr. Luisa Verdoliva – a Full Professor at the University Federico II of Naples, Italy, leads the Multimedia Forensics Lab. She serves as the Principal Investigator in the DISCOVER project funded by DARPA and the HORIZON Europe vera.ai project. Her research focuses on image and video processing, particularly in multimedia forensics, with over 145 academic publications. Previously, she held positions as a visiting professor at Friedrich-Alexander-University in the Computer Graphics Group, and a visiting scientist at Google AI in San Francisco with the Perception team.

She received the 2018 Google Faculty Award for Machine Perception and is an IEEE Fellow.

Dr. Sandra Wachter – Professor of Technology and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, conducts research on the legal and ethical implications of AI, Big Data, and robotics, as well as Internet and platform regulation. She leads the Governance of Emerging Technologies Research Programme, exploring legal, ethical, and technical aspects of AI and machine learning. Dr. Wachter has received numerous awards, including the ‘O2RB Excellence in Impact Award’, the Computer Weekly Women in UK Tech award, the Privacy Law Scholar Award for her paper A Right to Reasonable Inferences: Re-Thinking Data Protection Law in the Age of Big Data and AI, and the CognitionX ‘Outstanding Achievements & Research Contributions – AI Ethics’ for her contributions in AI governance.

Dr. Jane X. Wang – a Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, where she works to create and understand novel approaches for learning and meta-learning in a reinforcement learning context, inspired by the latest advancements in cognitive neuroscience. She obtained her Ph.D in Applied Physics from the University of Michigan, where she studied complex systems, physics, and computational neuroscience, before moving on to conduct research in cognitive neuroscience at Northwestern University. She has published in top-tier journals such as Science, Nature Neuroscience, and Neuron, as well as AI/ML conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR. See her insights on meta-learning.

Dr. Sarah Myers West – the Managing Director of the AI Now Institute. She recently served as a Senior Advisor on AI at the Federal Trade Commission, and is a Visiting Research Scientist at the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University and a Research Contributor at Cornell University's Citizens and Technology Lab. Her work appears in journals such as Social Studies of Science, New Media & Society, and others. Her research is also featured in media outlets like the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, PBS, and more.

Her forthcoming book, Tracing Code, draws on years of historical and social scientific research to examine the origins of data capitalism and commercial surveillance.

Dr. Jeannette Wing – Executive Vice President for Research and Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. With a focus on trustworthy AI, her expertise spans security, privacy, formal methods, programming languages and distributed systems.

Dr. Wing has been recognized with distinguished service awards from the Computing Research Association and the Association for Computing Machinery. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.

Dr. Anastasia Yendiki – an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School - Massachusetts General Hospital. Her research focuses on methods for mapping the circuitry of the human brain in health and disease.

Dr. Yendiki received an NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence award, which led to the development of TRACULA, the diffusion-weighted MRI analysis stream in FreeSurfer. In 2022, she received the five-year, $23.5M grant to continue mapping the human connectome.

At our 5th Annual LDV Vision Summit, she spoke about how brain imaging with MRI is transforming the diagnosis of mental illness.

Dr. Serena Yeung-Levy – Assistant Professor of Biomedical Data Science and, by courtesy, of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Dr. Yeung-Levy leads the Medical AI and Computer Vision Lab at Stanford. She is affiliated with the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Clinical Excellence Research Center, and the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine & Imaging. She is also a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator and has served on the NIH Advisory Committee to the Director Working Group on Artificial Intelligence.

She won the Entrepreneurial Computer Vision Challenge at our Inaugural Annual LDV Vision Summit in 2014.

Dr. Lihi Zelnik-Manor – the Executive Vice President for Innovation and Industry Relations of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Prof. Zelnik-Manor joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the Technion in 2007 and became a courtesy member of the Data and Decisions Faculty in 2023. She served as vice-dean of graduate studies in ECE and vice-dean for undergraduate students.

Previously, she was a Senior Director and the General Manager of Alibaba’s R&D center in Israel. Before that, she was a visiting Associate Professor at CornellTech and a Post-doctoral scholar at Caltech. Her main area of expertise is Computer Vision.

Dr. Ying Zheng – an entrepreneur and a computer scientist specializing in computer vision and AI. From a young age, she attended worldwide programming contests, winning championships and receiving recognition as one of the best programmers in the world. After working at Google and Apple as a senior research scientist, she co-founded AiFi, the world’s largest autonomous store platform with over 80 stores operating globally, surpassing Amazon Go.

At our 5th Annual LDV Vision Summit, she spoke about how the retail brain is using all synthetic data and competing with Amazon Go.

Dr. Maryam Ziaei – Co-Founder of iSono Health, Mentor for the Emergence Program @ Stanford University, Senior Advisor for Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health and NIH SBIR/STTR Reviewer at The National Institutes of Health. She has over 15 years of research and industrial experience in the development of microscale devices and systems for high volume-consumer electronics. Dr. Ziaei has led engineering teams in the design and manufacturing of piezoelectric transducers. She has many peer-reviewed publications and patents in the area of MEMS/sensors.

At our 6th Annual LDV Vision Summit, she spoke about combining AI and ultrasound to fight breast cancer.

"Thank you for including me on your excellent list of women in AI. It is so important to keep promoting women in tech and specifically at the forefront domains such as AI!" - Dr. Lihi Zelnik-Manor, the Executive Vice President for Innovation and Industry Relations of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.

"As long as I've known Evan (decades! cough), he's been a great convener of communities, culminating in the entrepreneurs and investors and constellation of interesting people orbiting around his firm, LDV Capital. I was lucky enough to join LDV's Annual General Meeting last week--which was a blast, of course--and heard about this effort to spotlight the work of women leading the field of visual AI. An incredibly interesting list of people." - Jim Albrecht. Jim has worked as an executive at Google, Samsung, and with Evan at Excite@Home in the 1990s.

Absolute pleasure to have been a part of this amazing crowd, pioneering CV/AI field. It’s always both fun and insightful whenever we cross paths with LDV and Evan, thanks for always being a supporter of this community!" - Dr. Ilke Demir, a Senior Research Scientist at Intel, Inventor of FakeCatcher, and ACM Distinguished Speaker.

Whom did we miss? Nominate colleagues or friends who build leapfrog deep tech solutions leveraging visual tech & AI to reshape business and society.

LDV Blog