Rosalind W. Picard, ScD, is the Grover M. Hermann Professor in Health Sciences and Technology and MIT’s Media Lab, founder and director of the Affective Computing research group at the MIT Media Lab, founding faculty chair of MIT's MindHandHeart Initiative, and a faculty member of the MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering. She has co-founded two companies: Affectiva (now part of Smart Eye), providing emotion AI technologies now used by more than 25% of the Global Fortune 500, and Empatica, providing wearable sensors and analytics to improve health. Starting from inventions by Dr. Picard and her team, Empatica created the first AI-based smart watch cleared by FDA (in neurology for monitoring seizures), helping alert to bring potentially life-saving help for people with epilepsy.

Dr. Picard is an active inventor with patents including wearable and non-contact sensors, algorithms, and systems for sensing, recognizing, and responding respectfully to human affective information. She is a member of the National Academy of Inventors and the National Academy of Engineering, as well as a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing (AAAC), and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering with highest honors from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and master's and doctorate degrees, both in electrical engineering and computer science, from MIT. Prior to joining the MIT Media Lab faculty, Dr. Picard worked as a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where she designed VLSI chips optimized for signal processing and developed new image compression techniques.

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