Photo from Socos Labs
Photo from Socos Labs

Vivienne Ming

Founder & Neuroscientist

Socos Labs

POSITION

Founder & Neuroscientist

COMPANY

Socos Labs

COUNTRY

USA

Website

Socos Labs

SCENE

Technology

SOCIAL

LinkedIn

Twitter

What makes Vivienne Ming a Global Shaker?

Dr Vivienne Ming is a leading expert in artificial and augmented intelligence. As a neuroscientist and serial entrepreneur, she is the co-founder and executive chair of Socos Labs, an independent think tank that examines visions of work, education, innovation and inclusive economies to inform human-centered policies. Vivienne also frequently gives talk about her AI-focused research into inclusion and gender in business.

“I think it’s incredibly valuable for people who have suffered in some way to have a voice in this,” she told The Guardian in 2018. “If you come from a background like mine, you are sceptical. You realise that technology increases inequality and it only gets better if we take active steps to avoid that.”

Vivienne’s research has been published in top academic journals, including Nature, Neural Information Processing Systems, Neural Computation and the Public Library of Science. Prior to her success in academia, she dropped out of university and struggled with homelessness, depression and suicidal ideations. Ten years later, she received a bachelor’s with honors in cognitive neuroscience from the University of California at San Diego and earned her master’s and PhD in Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, in parallel with the computational neuroscience program at the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition.

Prior to founding Socos, she held a joint postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University and University of California-Berkeley, where she later served as a research scientist and visiting scholar.

Vivienne was named as one of the BBC 100 Women in 2017, ranked #5 on the Financial Times’ list of top LBGTQ+ executives, and was listed on the 10 Women to Watch in Tech list for Inc. Magazine and as one of the most influential women in the Bay Area by the San Francisco Business Times. She has also received the Apollo Project Award from the Interlaw Diversity Forum and Financial Times, the Berkeley Visionary award. She was also the keynote speaker at SXSWedu and Uber Tech Day.

Widely renowned for her research and innovations, Vivienne serves as an advisor and sits on the board of numerous startups and nonprofits, such as StartOut, HUMM, The Palm Center, Cornerstone Capital, Platypus Institute, Shiftgig, Zoic Capita, and many others. When her son was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, she invented Jitterbug, a device that predicts optimal insulin dosing. She also invented ”Muse,” a machine learning-based a tool for parents.

Tags: AI, Diversity and Inclusion, emerging technologies, LGBTQ+, ML, Neuroscience, STEM, Women in STEM

Last updated: March 30, 2020