As AI continues to dominate the headlines, we’re taking a closer look at some of the brightest minds and key influencers within the industry.
Throughout the month of February, SiliconRepublic.com has been putting AI under the microscope for more of a deep dive, looking beyond the regular news to really explore what this technology could mean.
From the challenges around social media advertising in the new AI world to the concerns around its effect on the creative industries, there were plenty of worrying trends to focus on. However, there were also positive sides to the technology, such as its ability to preserve minority languages like Irish and its potential to reduce burnout in cybersecurity.
While exploring these topics, the AI news just kept rolling: DeepSeek continued to ruffle industry feathers, Thomson Reuters won a partial victory in its AI copyright case and the Paris AI Summit brought further investments and debates around regulation.
With so much going on in the industry, we thought it was important to draw your attention to some key influencers you should know within the AI space.
Last year, we brought you a list of 13 people who have helped to shape the industry, including the godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton, prominent AI researcher Yoshua Bengio, Ireland’s Abeba Birhane and responsible AI professor Virginia Dignum.
Once again, there are simply too many influential researchers, engineers, scientists, policymakers and leaders within the field of AI to mention them all, but we wanted to bring you a selection of 15 more experts to add to your follow list.
Patricia Scanlon
Kildare-native Patricia Scanlon became Ireland’s first AI ambassador in 2022 and wants to demystify AI and promote its positive impacts on Ireland’s future. She’s also the founder of SoapBox Labs, which develops accurate and secure voice technology for children.
Speaking to SiliconRepublic.com, Scanlon said AI could potentially be “a holy grail” if trained correctly because it could remove the danger of human bias. She is also a member of Ireland’s AI Advisory Council.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
With more than 20 years of experience in AI, Eliezer Yudkowsky is a US-based researcher and ‘decision theorist’ who has written extensively about the long-term future of the technology.
Yudkowsky is also a founder and research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a nonprofit that aims to ensure that smarter-than-human AI has a positive impact on the world. He is also one of the brains behind LessWrong, an online forum dedicated to improving human reasoning and decision-making.
Lucilla Sioli
In May 2024, the EU established a dedicated AI Office within the European Commission to play a key role in the implementation of the landmark AI Act. This office is led by Lucilla Sioli.
Having previously worked as the director for artificial intelligence and digital industry within the European Commission, Sioli has a wealth of knowledge around AI regulation. In her new role, she is responsible for the coordination of the European AI strategy as well as the implementation of the AI Act and international collaboration in trustworthy AI.
Liang Wenfeng
An undeniable disrupter in the AI space, Liang Wenfeng is the founder of DeepSeek, the Chinese AI start-up that ruffled many industry feathers at the beginning of the year when it released its own large language model, R1, for what it said was a fraction of the price compared to its US competitors.
In an interview with Chinese media outlet Waves last year, he said China’s AI can’t be in the position of following forever. “We often say that there is a gap of one or two years between China’s AI and the United States, but the real gap is the difference between originality and imitation.”
Sara Hooker
Half-Irish computer scientist Sara Hooker has been making international waves in the AI space. Currently she’s the VP of research and head of Cohere for AI, a research lab that seeks to solve complex machine learning problems within AI company Cohere.
Prior to her current role, Hooker worked as a research scientist at Google Brain. She also co-founded the Trustworthy ML Initiative and is on the World Economic Forum council on the future of artificial intelligence.
Barry Scannell
Barry Scannell is a partner in William Fry’s Technology department specialising in artificial intelligence, copyright, IP and data protection, having previously served as director of legal affairs and regulatory compliance at the Irish Music Rights Organisation.
He is an internationally recognised as a leading expert in the area of AI law, a member of Ireland’s AI Advisory Council and has written extensively about issues around the EU AI Act, copyright issues, biometric systems and workplace regulations in relation to AI.
Melanie Mitchell
Melanie Mitchell is a US-based scientist and professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Her current research focuses on conceptual abstraction, analogy-making and visual recognition in AI systems.
Mitchell is also an author of numerous books and academic papers on the topics of AI, cognitive science and complex systems. Her latest book is entitled ‘Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans’.
Alessandro Curioni
With more than 30 years under his belt, Alessandro Curioni is an IBM veteran and currently vice-president of IBM Europe and Africa and director of the IBM Research Lab in Zurich, Switzerland.
Curioni is an internationally recognised leader in the area of high-performance computing and computational science. He was a member of the team that won the Gordon Bell Prize in 2013 and 2015, and he is also a member of the Swiss Academy of Technical Sciences.
Juliette Powell
Juliette Powell is an entrepreneur, technologist, strategist and author of ‘The AI Dilemma: 7 Principles for Responsible Technology’. Her consulting services focus on global strategy and scenarios related to AI and data, banking, mobile, retail, social gaming and responsible technology.
Powell was a co-founder of the research network WeTheData with Intel Labs, is a faculty member at New York University’s interactive telecommunications programme and the founding partner of Kleiner Powell International.
Clément Delangue
Clément (Clem) Delangue is the co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, the open-source AI start-up first founded in 2016 that has been riding the AI wave in recent years. The company has built a platform where members of the machine learning community can collaborate and host their AI models and code, in a similar style to GitHub.
In 2023, multiple tech giants including Nvidia, Salesforce, Google and Amazon participated in a major funding round, giving the machine learning company $235m and putting its valuation at $4.5bn.
Nyalleng Moorosi
Nyalleng Moorosi is a senior researcher at the Distributed AI Research (DAIR) Institute. She is passionate about democratising AI and is a founding member of the Deep Learning Indaba, a machine learning consortium of AI/ML practitioners in Africa, and she’s a member of A+ Alliance, an international coalition that seeks to correct gender bias in AI.
Before DAIR, Moorosi was a research software engineer at Google, where she was one of the first employees at the Google Africa research lab, and a senior researcher at the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial research.
Barry O’Sullivan
Barry O’Sullivan is a professor in the School of Computer Science and IT at University College Cork and one of Ireland’s leading AI experts.
He is also founding director of the Insight Research Centre for Data Analytics and has won multiple awards for working in the field, including the EurAI Distinguished Service Award in 2023 and the Nerode Prize, one of the top computer science prizes in the world.
Akiko Murakami
Already the chief digital officer of Sompo Japan Insurance, Akiko Murakami was recently named the first director of Japan’s AI Safety Institute, a specialised organisation to verify the safety of AI.
Prior to her current roles, Murakami was a researcher of natural language processing, social analysis and text mining at IBM Research for 16 years and she also played a key role in the development of IBM Japan’s AI system ‘Watson’.
Ian Goodfellow
As Apple’s former director of machine learning, Ian Goodfellow is a major expert within the industry. He joined the company in 2019 before leaving in 2022 over changes to its return-to-office policy after the Covid-19 pandemic.
Prior to his work at Apple, Goodfellow was a senior staff research scientist at Google. He now works as research scientist for DeepMind, which is owned by Google. For his work with neural networks, he was described by MIT Technology Review as the man who has “given machines the gift of imagination”.
Carme Artigas
With more than 25 years of experience in the tech sector, Carme Artigas is a recognised expert in big data, AI and tech innovation.
In 2020, she was appointed as the first secretary of state for digitalisation and artificial intelligence in Spain, a position she still holds. In 2022, she was appointed as a UN commissioner on artificial intelligence and she’s the co-chair of the high-level advisory body on AI.
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