These eight women are at the forefront of the field of artificial intelligence today. They hail from ... [+] academia, startups, large technology companies, venture capital and beyond.

It is a simple truth: the field of artificial intelligence is far too male-dominated. According to a 2018 study from Wired and Element AI, just 12% of AI researchers globally are female.

Artificial intelligence will reshape every corner of our lives in the coming yearsfrom healthcare to finance, from education to government. It is therefore troubling that those building this technology do not fully represent the society they are poised to transform.

Yet there are many brilliant women at the forefront of AI today. As entrepreneurs, academic researchers, industry executives, venture capitalists and more, these women are shaping the future of artificial intelligence. They also serve as role models for the next generation of AI leaders, reflecting what a more inclusive AI community can and should look like.

Featured below are eight of the leading women in the field of artificial intelligence today.

Joy Buolamwini has aptly been described as the conscience of the A.I. revolution.

Her pioneering work on algorithmic bias as a graduate student at MIT opened the worlds eyes to the racial and gender prejudices embedded in facial recognition systems. Amazon, Microsoft and IBM each suspended their facial recognition offerings this year as a result of Buolamwinis research, acknowledging that the technology was not yet fit for public use. Buolamwinis work is powerfully profiled in the new documentary Coded Bias.

Buolamwini stands at the forefront of a burgeoning movement to identify and address the social consequences of artificial intelligence technology, a movement she advances through her nonprofit Algorithmic Justice League.

Buolamwini on the battle against algorithmic bias: When I started talking about this, in 2016, it was such a foreign concept. Today, I cant go online without seeing some news article or story about a biased AI system. People are just now waking up to the fact that there is a problem. Awareness is goodand then that awareness needs to lead to action. That is the phase that were in.

From SRI to Google to Uber to NVIDIA, Claire Delaunay has held technical leadership roles at many of Silicon Valleys most iconic organizations. She was also co-founder and engineering head at Otto, the pedigreed but ill-fated autonomous trucking startup helmed by Anthony Levandowski.

In her current role at NVIDIA, Delaunay is focused on building tools and platforms to enable the deployment of autonomous machines at scale.

Delaunay on the tradeoffs between working at a big company and a startup: Some kinds of breakthroughs can only be accomplished at a big company, and other kinds of breakthroughs can only be accomplished at a startup. Startups are very good at deconstructing things and generating discontinuous big leaps forward. Big companies are very good at consolidating breakthroughs and building out robust technology foundations that enable future innovation.

Rana el Kaliouby has dedicated her career to making AI more emotionally intelligent.

Kaliouby is credited with pioneering the field of Emotion AI. In 2009, she co-founded the startup Affectiva as a spinout from MIT to develop machine learning systems capable of understanding human emotions. Today, the companys technology is used by 25% of the Fortune 500, including for media analytics, consumer behavioral research and automotive use cases.

Kaliouby on her big-picture vision: My lifes work is about humanizing technology before it dehumanizes us.

Daphne Kollers wide-ranging career illustrates the symbiosis between academia and industry that is a defining characteristic of the field of artificial intelligence.

Koller has been a professor at Stanford since 1995, focused on machine learning. In 2012 she co-founded education technology startup Coursera with fellow Stanford professor and AI leader Andrew Ng. Coursera is today a $2.6 billion ed tech juggernaut.

Kollers most recent undertaking may be her most ambitious yet. She is the founding CEO at insitro, a startup applying machine learning to transform pharmaceutical drug discovery and development. Insitro has raised roughly $250 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others and recently announced a major commercial partnership with Bristol Myers Squibb.

Koller on advice for those just starting out in the field of AI: Pick an application of AI that really matters, that is really societally worthwhilenot all AI applications areand then put in the hard work to truly understand that domain. I am able to build insitro today only because I spent 20 years learning biology. An area I might suggest to young people today is energy and the environment.

Few individuals have left more of a mark on the world of AI in the twenty-first century than Fei-Fei Li.

As a young Princeton professor in 2007, Li conceived of and spearheaded the ImageNet project, a database of millions of labeled images that has changed the entire trajectory of AI. The prescient insight behind ImageNet was that massive datasetsmore than particular algorithmswould be the key to unleashing AIs potential. When Geoff Hinton and team debuted their neural network-based model trained on ImageNet at the 2012 ImageNet competition, the modern era of deep learning was born.

Li has since become a tenured professor at Stanford, served as Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud, headed Stanfords AI lab, joined the Board of Directors at Twitter, cofounded the prominent nonprofit AI4ALL, and launched Stanfords Human-Centered AI Institute (HAI). Across her many leadership positions, Li has tirelessly advocated for a more inclusive, equitable and human approach to AI.

Li on why diversity in AI is so important: Our technology is not independent of human values. It represents the values of the humans that are behind the design, development and application of the technology. So, if were worried about killer robots, we should really be worried about the creators of the technology. We want the creators of this technology to represent our values and represent our shared humanity.

Anna Patterson has led a distinguished career developing and deploying AI products, both at large technology companies and at startups.

A long-time executive at Google, which she first joined in 2004, Patterson led artificial intelligence efforts for years as the companys VP of Engineering. In 2017 she launched Googles AI venture capital fund Gradient Ventures, where today she invests in early-stage AI startups.

Patterson serves on the board of a number of promising AI startups including Algorithmia, Labelbox and test.ai. She is also a board director at publicly-traded Square.

Patterson on one question she asks herself before investing in any AI startup: Do I find myself constantly thinking about their vision and mission?

Daniela Rus is one of the worlds leading roboticists.

She is an MIT professor and the first female head of MITs Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), one of the largest and most prestigious AI research labs in the world. This makes her part of a storied lineage: previous directors of CSAIL (and its predecessor labs) over the decades have included AI legends Marvin Minsky, J.C.R. Licklider and Rodney Brooks.

Rus groundbreaking research has advanced the state of the art in networked collaborative robots (robots that can work together and communicate with one another), self-reconfigurable robots (robots that can autonomously change their structure to adapt to their environment), and soft robots (robots without rigid bodies).

Rus on a common misconception about AI: It is important for people to understand that AI is nothing more than a tool. Like any other tool, it is neither intrinsically good nor bad. It is solely what we choose to do with it. I believe that we can do extraordinarily positive things with AIbut it is not a given that that will happen.

Shivon Zilis has spent time on the leadership teams of several companies at AIs bleeding edge: OpenAI, Neuralink, Tesla, Bloomberg Beta.

She is the youngest board member at OpenAI, the influential research lab behind breakthroughs like GPT-3. At NeuralinkElon Musks mind-bending effort to meld the human brain with digital machinesZilis works on high-priority strategic initiatives in the office of the CEO.

Zilis on her attitude toward new technology development: Im astounded by how often the concept of building moats comes up. If you think the technology youre building is good for the world, why not laser focus on expanding your tech tree as quickly as possible versus slowing down and dividing resources to impede the progress of others?

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8 Leading Women In The Field Of AI - Forbes