Leading Women in AI

Women have made fundamental contributions to computing and artificial intelligence, although their work has not always received equal recognition. Learning about their careers broadens our role models and helps open doors for future generations.

Here are a few of those role models. This is a selection, not an exhaustive list: many more women are researching, building businesses and teaching in this field. The roles and programmes described reflect the article’s original publication context in 2022.

Ada Lovelace and the first algorithm

This list could hardly begin without Ada Lovelace. A mathematician and writer, she was a pioneer of programming. Her notes on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine included an algorithm intended to run on the machine. 

Born in England in 1815, Ada received a mathematical education encouraged by her mother, Anne Isabella Noel Byron, at a time when few women had access to such studies. Her teachers included Mary Somerville, an astronomer, mathematician and science writer.

Ada collaborated with Charles Babbage, inventor of the Analytical Engine, a precursor to modern computers; her husband was William King. She translated Luigi Menabrea’s article about the machine into English and added extensive notes. One note describes an algorithm for calculating Bernoulli numbers. This contribution established her as a pioneer of computer programming.

Nuria Oliver, international Spanish scientist

Nuria Oliver is one of Spain’s best-known AI researchers. She worked on pandemic data analysis to support COVID-19 decision-making in the Valencian regional government. She was the first woman to serve as a scientific director at Telefónica and has worked with Data-Pop Alliance on using data for social development.

Her career has a strong international reach. She advocates for human-centred, ethical AI and encourages more women to study engineering. 

Anita Schjøll and the social value of AI

Anita Schjøll Brede co-founded Iris.ai, a company that applies AI to working with scientific information. Singularity University’s summer programme provided a meeting point for developing the project. Alongside her entrepreneurial work, she has taught and spoken about artificial intelligence. Her interest in technologies such as robotics, autonomous vehicles and personalised medicine centres on a shared question: how can we use them to improve the world?

Cecilia Tham

Cecilia Tham co-founded allWomen with Laura Fernández. The project began in Barcelona to make technology education more accessible to women. The intensive programme described in this article lasted 11 weeks and focused on artificial intelligence and learning from a diverse, collaborative and inclusive perspective.

She also helped establish FabCafe Barcelona, a space combining coffee and digital fabrication within an international network that includes locations such as Kyoto, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Strasbourg, Monterrey and Bangkok. We would love to meet her in one of these spaces where creativity and technology come together.

Terah Lyons and the institutional sphere

She worked as a political advisor to the United States technological director in the White House, which led her to be in charge of co-directing the Artificial Intelligence initiative, which would mark the future of the design of a national policy strategy on this technology.

She served as executive director of Partnership on AI, an organisation that brings together different stakeholders to study and promote good practices in artificial intelligence so that its development benefits people and society.

Rachel Thomas and the ethics of algorithms

Rachel Thomas was the founding director of the University of San Francisco’s Center for Applied Data Ethics. Her work addresses risks such as disinformation, intrusive surveillance and algorithmic bias. She co-founded fast.ai and helped create Practical Deep Learning for Coders, which introduced deep learning to more than 200,000 students, including those with modest datasets and computing resources. A software engineer with a PhD in mathematics from Duke, she was named one of Forbes’ 20 Incredible Women in AI.

Claire Delaunay and robotics

Claire Delaunay served as vice president of engineering at NVIDIA, working on Isaac, a platform for robotics specialists and developers. Before that, she led engineering at Uber following its acquisition of Otto, which she co-founded. She also led a robotics programme at Google and founded Botiful and Robotics Valley. By the time this article was published, she had 15 years of experience in robotics and autonomous vehicles, leading teams at startups, research labs and Fortune 500 companies. She holds a master’s degree in computer engineering from the École Privée des Sciences Informatiques and is a role model for people entering the field.

Fei-Fei Li, Women in Tech

Fei-Fei Li is a professor of computer science at Stanford and a co-founder of its Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, HAI. She served as a vice president at Google and chief scientist of AI and machine learning at Google Cloud. Her research spans machine learning, deep learning, computer vision and AI applications in healthcare. She has also worked in cognitive and computational neuroscience.

Her work has been featured in publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Science, Wired, MIT Technology Review and the Financial Times. Her honours include being named to ELLE’s Women in Tech 2017 list, recognising her contribution as a leading figure in AI.

You can be the one who leads the change

These careers show different ways to help shape the future of AI: through research, entrepreneurship, teaching or advocacy for responsible development. This is just a small selection. You can discover more role models in our posts on instagram or threads of Twitter to know more.

You can contribute to this field too. Explore our local groups and start learning programming and artificial intelligence with Saturdays.Ai.

Written by

Elena del Castillo