Introducing the Women in AI Community
In celebration of International Women's Day, it's important to remember that it's not just a day.
We want to highlight leading female figures in our AI community, who not only define the field of AI but also enable others within the community to thrive – creating a more balanced and fair community – the best form of empowerment.
If you're a female leader and looking to join our community, please contact [email protected]
NEW: Women in AI Workshop
At this year's Efficient Generative AI Summit (the pre-day on Sept 9), we're excited to announce that we're hosting a Women in AI Workshop titled 'Women at the Top in Tech Are Leading the Way in Gen AI'.
This will then be followed by a networking drinks!
Workshop Speakers Include...
Gunjan Mundhra
Gunjan Mundhra is a Principal at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), based out of Seattle. She is a core member of the Telecom, Media and Technology (TMT) and Marketing, Sales and Pricing (MSP) practice areas at BCG and actively contributes to several Women at BCG initiatives. Gunjan began her journey at BCG India in 2018 and transferred to BCG US in 2020. Prior to joining BCG, she worked in ZS Associates for ~2 years serving US pharmaceutical clientele.
Maria Barisano
Maria Barisano is a Managing Director and Partner, based in the San Francisco office. She has been with BCG since 2013. As a core group member of BCG's Technology Media and Telecommunication (TMT) Practice Area, she works mainly for companies in the technology / high-tech industry.
Maria is leading the Women in Tech effort on the West Coast within BCG. Maria consistently engages with numerous high-profile women C-suite personnel in the tech industry. Maria is immensely knowledgeable in a broad set of topics, with a strong focus on growth/Go To Market acceleration.
Uche Monu
Uche Monu is a Partner, based in the Bay Area- Silicon Valley office. Her primary focus is on technology and healthcare transformations. She has been with BCG since 2017.
Uche has been a key member of BCG’s Racial Equity Task Force and the Black and Latinx affinity network. Additionally, Uche was a major force behind the launch of BCG's first public diversity, equity, and inclusion report in March 2021. She also serves as a West Coast Node of BCG’s Black and Latinx Network
Experts In Our Community Include...
Alexis Black Bjorlin
Dr. Alexis Black Bjorlin was previously VP, Infrastructure Hardware Engineering at Meta. She also serves on the board of directors at Digital Realty and Celestial AI. Prior to Meta, Dr. Bjorlin was Senior Vice President and General Manager of Broadcom’s Optical Systems Division and previously Corporate Vice President of the Data Center Group and General Manager of the Connectivity Group at Intel. Prior to Intel, she spent eight years as President of Source Photonics, where she also served on the board of directors. She earned a B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in Materials Science from the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Jia Li
Jia is Co-founder, Chief AI Officer and President of a Stealth Generative AI Startup. She is elected as IEEE Fellow for Leadership in Large Scale AI. She is co-teaching the inaugural course of Generative AI and Medicine at Stanford University, where she has served multiple roles including Advisory Board Committee to Nourish, Chief AI Fellow, RWE for Sleep Health and Adjunct Professor at the School of Medicine in the past. She was the Founding Head of R&D at Google Cloud AI. At Google, she oversaw the development of the full stack of AI products on Google Cloud to power solutions for diverse industries. With the passion to make more impact to our everyday life, she later became an entrepreneur, building and advising companies with award-winning platforms to solve today's greatest challenges in life. She has served as Mentor and Professor-in-Residence at StartX, advising founders/companies from Stanford/Alumni. She is the Co-founder and Chairperson of HealthUnity Corporation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. She served briefly at Accenture as a part-time Chief AI Follow for the Generative AI strategy. She also serves as an advisor to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). She is a board member of the Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose. She was selected as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, a recognition bestowed on 100 of the world’s most promising business leaders, artists, public servants, technologists, and social entrepreneurs in 2018. Before joining Google, She was the Head of Research at Snap, leading the AI/AR innovation effort. She received her Ph.D. degree from the Computer Science Department at Stanford University.
Sravanthi Rajanala
Sravanthi Rajanala is the Director of Data Science and Machine Learning in Walmart's Search Technologies. She began her career in telecom and worked for Microsoft and Nokia before joining Bing Search in 2011 to work in machine learning and search. Sravanthi has led initiatives in query and document understanding, ranking, and question answering. In 2021, she joined Walmart and now leads the Search Core Algorithms, Machine Translation, and Metrics Science. Sravanthi holds a Master's degree in Computational Science from the Indian Institute of Science and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Osmania University.
Zairah Mustahsan
Zairah Mustahsan is a Staff Data Scientist at You.com, an AI chatbot for search, where she leverages her expertise in statistical and machine-learning techniques to build analytics and experimentation platforms. Previously, Zairah was a Data Scientist at IBM Research, researching Natural Language Processing (NLP) and AI Fairness topics. Zairah obtained her M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania, where she researched scikit-learn model performance. Her findings have since been used as guidelines for machine learning. Zairah is a regular speaker at AI conferences such as NeurIPS, AI4, AI Hardware & Edge AI Summit, and ODSC. Zairah has published her work in top AI conferences such AAAI and has over 300 citations. Aside from work, Zairah enjoys adventure sports and poetry.
Sally Ward-Foxton
Sally Ward-Foxton has been writing about the electronics industry for more than a decade. As a freelance journalist she has published articles in EE Times, Electronic Design Europe, Microwaves & RF, ECN, Electronic Specifier: Design, IoT Embedded Systems, Electropages, Components in Electronics and many more. She also supplies technical writing and ghostwriting services to several of Europe's leading PR agencies. She holds a Masters' degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Cambridge, UK.
Sree Ganesan
Sree Ganesan, VP of Product, d-Matrix: Sree is responsible for product management functions and business development efforts across the company. She manages the product lifecycle, definition and translation of customer needs to the product development function, acting as the voice of the customer. Prior, Sree led the Software Product Management effort at Habana Labs/Intel, delivering state-of-the-art deep learning capabilities of the Habana SynapseAI® software suite to the market. Previously, she was Engineering Director in Intel’s AI Products Group, where she was responsible for AI software strategy and deep learning framework integration for Nervana NNP AI accelerators. Sree earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and a PhD in computer engineering from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio.
Lisa Cohen
Lisa Cohen is Director of Data Science for Gemini (formerly "Bard"), Google Assistant, and Search Platforms. She leads an organization of data scientists at Google, responsible for using data to create excellent user experiences across these products, and partnering closely with Product, Engineering, and User Experience Research. Formerly, Lisa was Head of Data Science and Engineering for Twitter, helping drive the strategy and direction of the Twitter product, through machine learning, metric development, experimentation and causal analyses. Before Twitter, Lisa led the Azure Customer Growth Analytics organization as part of Microsoft Cloud Data sciences. Her team was responsible for analyzing OKRs, informing data-driven decisions, and developing data science models to help customers be successful on Azure. Lisa worked at Microsoft for 17yrs, and also helped develop multiple versions of Visual Studio. She holds Bachelor and Masters degrees from Harvard in Applied Mathematics. You can follow Lisa on LinkedIn and Medium.
Jaya Kawale
Jaya Kawale is the head of Machine Learning at Tubi, a Fox Corporation content platform. Jaya´s team works on solving various ML problems for Tubi´s product, ranging from recommendations, content understanding and acquisition, ads ML, etc. Her team also work on the application of cutting edge machine learning technologies such as contextual bandits, deep learning, computer vision and NLP to improve user experience at Tubi.
Puja Das
Dr. Puja Das, leads the Personalization team at Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD) which includes offerings on Max, HBO, Discovery+ and many more.
Prior to WBD, she led a team of Applied ML researchers at Apple, who focused on building large scale recommendation systems to serve personalized content on the App Store, Arcade and Apple Books. Her areas of expertise include user modeling, content modeling, recommendation systems, multi-task learning, sequential learning and online convex optimization. She also led the Ads prediction team at Twitter (now X), where she focused on relevance modeling to improve App Ads personalization and monetization across all of Twitter surfaces.
She obtained her Ph.D from University of Minnesota in Machine Learning, where the focus of her dissertation was online learning algorithms, which work on streaming data. Her dissertation was the recipient of the prestigious IBM Ph D. Fellowship Award.
She is active in the research community and part of the program committee at ML and recommendation system conferences. Shas mentored several undergrad and grad students and participated in various round table discussions through Grace Hopper Conference, Women in Machine Learning Program colocated with NeurIPS, AAAI and Computing Research Association- Women’s chapter.
Gayathri Radhakrishnan
Gayathri is currently Partner at Hitachi Ventures. Prior to that, she was with Micron Ventures, actively investing in startups that apply AI to solve critical problems in the areas of Manufacturing, Healthcare and Automotive. She brings over 20 years of multi-disciplinary experience across product management, product marketing, corporate strategy, M&A and venture investments in large Fortune 500 companies such as Dell and Corning and in startups. She has also worked as an early stage investor at Earlybird Venture Capital, a premier European venture capital fund based in Germany. She has a Masters in EE from The Ohio State University and MBA from INSEAD in France. She is also a Kauffman Fellow - Class 16.
Helen Byrne
Helen leads the Solution Architects team at Graphcore, helping innovators build their AI solutions using Graphcore’s Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs). She has been at Graphcore for more than 5 years, previously leading AI Field Engineering and working in AI Research, working on problems in Distributed Machine Learning. Before landing in the technology industry, she worked in Investment Banking. Her background is in Mathematics and she has a MSc in Artificial Intelligence.
Becky Soltanian
Dr. Soltanian’s career in the field of AI has been extensive. With a global reach, her endeavors in AI, engineering, and academia span over 20 years. Her background includes a considerable amount of hands-on experience in a variety of roles in automation, AI, robotics, and computer vision. Most recently, Dr. Soltanian worked as a principal artificial intelligence and machine learning engineer, developing algorithms that improved perception and localization. She has also held leadership and management positions where she successfully directed teams in developing and applying advanced technologies in the use of lidar and other data types.
Dr. Soltanian holds a PhD in Electrical, Electronics and Communications Engineering; a Master of Technology in Digital Signal Processing; and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering. She’s worked for a variety of different companies such as Byton, Daqri and Velodyne Lidar, and has six (6) patents in the field of Autonomous Driving and automation.
Influential Interviews With Leading Female Figures
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Meet the women behind the AI Hardware & Edge AI Summit
Priya Khosla
Ruby Goodall
Tammy Nkiwane
