Rosalind Picard, Sc.D.

Translating Research into Life-Saving Products

After building some of the first wearables to measure the physiology of emotion and stress, we stumbled across unexpected findings, which might potentially save lives. How did we go from the lab, into a market where there was little to no funding, through FDA, and now onto the wrists of people around the world who say it’s making a life-saving difference? Almost nothing went as planned. This short talk will tell the story of what worked (and what didn’t).

Biography

Picard Headshot

Rosalind Picard, Sc.D. is founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, co-founder of Affectiva, Inc., providing Emotion AI technology, and co-founder and chief scientist of Empatica, Inc., creators of the first FDA-cleared smart watch using AI in epilepsy. Picard is author or co-author of over three hundred peer-reviewed scientific articles in signal processing, computer vision, pattern recognition, machine learning, human-computer interaction, affective computing, and neurology. She is known internationally for her book, Affective Computing, which helped launch the field by that name. She was a founding member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Wearable Information Systems, helping boot up research on wearable computing in the 90’s. Picard is a fellow of the IEEE and an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering. She holds a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech and Masters and Doctorate degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. Picard leads research developing AI/machine learning algorithms, analytics, and sensors in order to improve human health and wellbeing.