Women Leading Visual Tech

Our Women Leading Visual Tech series is here to showcase women whose work in visual tech is reshaping business and society. At LDV Capital, we believe in the power of people and community to improve our world. We invest in people building visual technology businesses, have a phenomenal network of experts, and organize monthly Community dinners and annual LDV Vision Summits.
We hope this series will inspire you.

Dr. Elaine Wan: Delivering Personalized Healthcare via 4D Imaging & Artificial Intelligence

Dr. Elaine Wan is the Esther Aboodi Associate Professor of Medicine in Cardiology and Cardiac Electrophysiology at Columbia University Medical Center, College of Physicians and Surgeons and attending physician at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. She is the Director of Electrophysiology Research and oversees all electrophysiology clinical trials.

Dr. Wan is a physician-scientist and focuses on the development of novel treatments for heart failure, vascular dysfunction and arrhythmias such as atrial fibrillation. She is a translational researcher also interested in the development of innovative imaging modalities to improve ablation delivery. Dr. Wan is the recipient of numerous national and international awards.

We discussed noninvasive 3D imaging of the heart, 4D imaging, how AI can help us make sense of all the data that our wearables collect, the impact of COVID-19 on hearts and so much more!

Karin Andrea Stephan: Can AI Detect and Identify Changes in Our Well-Being?

Karin Andrea Stephan is a serial entrepreneur, community leader, and startup coach.

Karin Andrea has deep domain expertise in tracking mental health. Her recent master thesis, titled “Therapist in the Ear - How hearables can extend the efficacy of treatment into a patient’s daily life”. In 2021, she co-founded Earkick to build the world’s first data-driven mental health tracker via multimodal sentiment analysis of physiological biomarkers. The Earkick mobile app provides automated measurements and actionable suggestions based on real-time data. It’s one of our LDV portfolio companies.

We chatted about the potential of an AI-powered tool that is able to track and treat mental health disorders in real-time.

Dr. Karen Panetta: The Magic of Engineering and Computer Science

Dr. Karen Panetta is an electrical and computer engineer, inventor and Dean of Graduate Education for the School of Engineering at Tufts University. Her research areas include artificial intelligence, machine learning, automated systems, simulation and visual sensing systems.

She is the recipient of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Math and Engineering Mentoring from U.S. President Barack Obama. Dr. Panetta founded the "Nerd Girls" program, which encourages young women to pursue engineering and science. Karen is the editor-in-chief of IEEE WIE Magazine and co-author of the book, "Count Girls In”.

We spoke about teaching computers to see like humans, the role of diversity of perspectives, her social impact projects, the role of AI in biological image processing and so much more.

Chen Zhang: The Future of Effortlessly Cinematic AI-powered Video Storytelling

Chen Zhang is co-founder & CEO at Aquifer – a platform for teams and creators to make stunning animated videos and livestreams with their brand's IP in minutes. It’s one of our LDV portfolio companies.

Previously, she led teams in designing and developing new products and XR experiences for Fortune500 companies at Part Time Evil, an immersive studio she co-founded. Before that, Chen led product strategy and brand marketing at frog design, Under Armour, and VRBO and consulted for Gensler.

We discussed her route to being an entrepreneur, how she is overcoming a lot of the challenges associated with being an early-stage business and how Aquifer is going to impact every brand-consumer interaction out there in the long haul.

Dr. Lydia Chilton: Can AI Generate Visual Content for Social Media?

Dr. Lydia Chilton is 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 works on constructing visual metaphors for creative ads and tools that help to write humorous stories and news satire. 

Dr. Chilton received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2015. She received her Master’s in Engineering from MIT in 2009 and her SB in 2007, also from MIT. Before joining Columbia Engineering in 2017, she was a postdoctoral student at Stanford University. 

We discussed visual metaphors in creative ads, her career in academia, and the AI-powered tools that she builds.

Nour Karessli: The Future of Online Shopping and Digital Fashion

Nour Karessli is a Senior Data Scientist at Zalando, Germany’s multinational e-commerce company. She is utilizing state-of-the-art computer vision and AI techniques to leverage the visual cues present in fashion images to better understand the complex problem of size and fit.

Nour holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering focused on Software Engineering from Damascus University. She completed her Master’s in Computer Science from Saarland University focused on machine learning and computer vision.

We discussed the future of online shopping and digital fashion.

Dr. Kate Darling: Can We Compare Robots to Animals and Build Diverse Relationships With Them?

Dr. Kate Darling is an academic with a background in the legal and ethical implications of technology and a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab. She is a leading expert in Robot Ethics and an author of the book “The New Breed: What Our History with Animals Reveals about Our Future with Robots”.

She has an honorary doctorate of sciences from Middlebury College. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Guardian, BBC, NPR, Forbes, WIRED, The Atlantic, Die Zeit, The Japan Times, and more.

We spoke about our tendency to assign human characteristics to the machines in our lives.

Dr. Jane X. Wang: Can Meta-Learning Unlock the Magic of AI?

Dr. Jane Wang is a senior research scientist at DeepMind. She is one of the UK’s rising stars in cutting-edge artificial intelligence research and one of the organizers of the Women in Machine Learning community. Her background is in computational and cognitive neuroscience, complex systems, and physics.

Jane’s recent work focuses on reinforcement learning and meta-learning with fantastic successes, such as the recent release of Alchemy. She imagines that the most powerful AI models of the future will be indistinguishable from magic.

We discussed where meta-learning will generate opportunities for business and society.

Dr. Mackenzie Mathis: “Deep neural networks were built with inspiration from the brain”

Mackenzie Mathis is a neuroscientist, a tenure-track professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, working within the Brain Mind Institute & Center for Neuroprosthetics. The lab is hosted at the Campus Biotech in Geneva, Switzerland, where she holds the Bertarelli Foundation Chair of Integrative Neuroscience.

Dr. Mathis founded the Adaptive Motor Control Lab to investigate the neural basis of adaptive motor behaviors in mice to inform future translational research in neurological diseases. Her team’s goal is to reverse engineer the neural circuits that drive adaptive motor behavior by studying artificial and natural intelligence.

We spoke about her work to beat neurodegenerative diseases like Lou Gehrig’s, the awesome computer vision tool she developed – DeepLabCut, and so much more!

Dr. Sujatha Ramanujan: “Your Invention Starts With a Question”

Dr. Sujatha Ramanujan is a serial entrepreneur and seasoned executive with 25 years of experience in medical devices and consumer electronics. She currently manages Luminate – an investment fund and business accelerator for startups that have optics, photonics, or imaging-enabled applications.

She has started, built, and grown three startups specialized in cardiac surgical equipment, optical communications, and nanomaterials. In addition, Dr. Ramanujan has held scientific, technical leadership, and laboratory head positions in Chrysler Corporation, GE, Kodak, Carestream, and Intrinsiq Materials.

We spoke about managing a crisis, fear of boredom, and a mission to revitalize the Rochester area.

Carol Reiley: “Robotics Makes Us Superhuman”

Carol Reiley is a serial entrepreneur and a computer scientist with the nickname “Mother of Robots.” Her 20 years of academic expertise and industry experience lay in artificial intelligence and robotics with applications in medical space, space exploration, disaster rescue, and much more.

She worked for Intuitive Surgical, Lockheed Martin, and General Electric. As an entrepreneur, she co-founded Drive.ai, a startup that managed to raise over $77 million, grew from an 8 person company to 200+ employees over 4 years, and was acquired by Apple. Most recently, Reiley founded DeepMusic.ai.

We spoke about current trends in robotics and AI, hard decisions, and hurdles of starting a company in a highly regulated industry.

Dr. Kavita Bala on Bridging the Gap Between Academia & Industry

Dr. Kavita Bala is an esteemed computer vision researcher, entrepreneur, and leader in the computer science space. Her research expertise lies in the area of computer vision and computer graphics using deep learning. Some of her work on cloud rendering is the core production engine in Autodesk's cloud rendering platform. She served as the Chair of the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University from 2018 through 2020 and has now been appointed dean of the Faculty of Computing and Information Science.

Dean Bala also co-founded Grokstyle, a graphics search company that won our 2016 LDV Vision Summit Entrepreneurial Computer Vision Competition and Grokstyle was acquired by Facebook. 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.

We spoke with Dr. Bala about her career path, current projects, and more.

Esther Dyson on Investing in Visual Technology Companies

Esther Dyson is an investor, journalist, author, businesswoman, commentator, and philanthropist. She is a leading angel investor focused on healthcare, open government, digital technology, biotechnology, logistics, and outer space. Currently, she is a full-time executive founder of Wellville, a ten-year project to show the long-term value, in both equity and resilience, of investing in health for all.

From October 2008 to March 2009, she lived in Star City outside Moscow, Russia, training as a backup cosmonaut. Apart from this brief sabbatical, she is an active board member for a variety of startups.

Among other topics, we discussed investing in visual technology companies, genetics, and AI-powered MRI-based cancer screenings.

Dr. Rana el Kaliouby on AI Reading Human Emotions

Rana el Kaliouby is an Egyptian-American scientist, entrepreneur, author, and AI thought leader on a mission to bring emotional intelligence to our digital world. She is the co-founder and CEO of Affectiva, an MIT Media Lab spinoff credited with creating the category of artificial emotional intelligence, or Emotion AI.

Most recently, Dr. el Kaliouby published her memoir, “Girl Decoded: A Scientist's Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology”.

We touched on her memoir ‘Girl Decoded’ and so much more!

Dr. Lourdes Agapito On Synthetic Media

Lourdes Agapito is a Professor of 3D Vision in the Department of Computer Science at University College London. Her research has been consistently focused on 3D dynamic scene understanding from a video. 

Dr. Agapito was granted Marie Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellowship and throughout her career, she’s been a Programme chair for the most prominent events in the industry. She is an elected member of the Executive Committee of the British Machine Vision Association, a member of the Vision and Imaging Science group, and the Centre for Inverse Problems.

We discussed her unique research in 3D vision and computer vision and how she made the jump from research to co-founding a fast-growing startup Synthesia, a company that generates localized and personalized videos using AI. It’s one of our LDV portfolio companies.

Dr. Gaile Gordon: “No Perfect Time to Start a Company”

Dr. Gaile Gordon has over 20 years of experience in computer vision-related products and R&D leadership. She has a proven track record transitioning technology from R&D to production in both enterprise and consumer markets. Dr. Gordon is the co-founder of TYZX, which produced 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 in 2012 and fueled their RealSense 3D technology products. Her product experience spans custom ASICs, firmware, software APIs, to end-user applications. Gaile received a Ph.D. from Harvard, an MS, and a BS from the MIT AI Lab. Gaile advises early-stage companies, is an Expert in Residence with us at LDV Capital and is an active angel investor.

We discussed Gaile’s impressive career in deep tech.

Dr. Michal Lipson on Silicon Photonics and Its Role For AI

Dr. Lipson is the Eugene Higgins Professor at Columbia University. Her research focus is on Nanophotonics. Dr. Lipson is a pioneer in the field of Silicon Photonics, which today is recognized as one of the most promising directions for solving the major bottlenecks in microelectronics. 

She is the inventor of over 30 issued patents and has co-authored more than 200 scientific publications. She founded PicoLuz and is an advisor to several startups, including LDV Capital’s portfolio company – Voyant Photonics.

We discussed her career path and entrepreneurism.

Dr. Timnit Gebru on Algorithmic Bias and Data Mining Ethics

Dr. Gebru is a pioneer in algorithmic bias and data mining. She won the computer vision competition at our LDV Vision Summit in 2017. She demonstrated the way to predict demographics using 50 million Google street view images. It was a part of her Ph.D. research project at Stanford.

Previously, she's held roles with Google, Microsoft Research Center, as well as with Apple. She's also the co-founder of the organization Black in AI and plays a leading role in the Women in Computer Vision and the Women in Machine learning groups.

We spoke about her recent projects, US Census, “Gender Shades”, AI bias, synthetic data, and the future of computer vision.

Let us know if you are working on exciting visual technology research or a new startup. It is never too early to reach out.