There has been much noise around the fathers and godfathers of Artificial Intelligence, but how about its mothers?
Let's start with Ada Lovelace, often regarded as the first computer programmer, and wrote the first algorithm meant to be run on a computer.

How about Ida Rhodes? She was a pioneer in the analysis of systems of programming and one of the OG #NLProc researchers, using syntactic parsing to improve existing methods in machine translation.

Really into generative models? Thank Betty Holberton, who wrote the first generative programming system capable of doing binary sort function, which inspired the first ideas about code compilation. She also invented breakpoints in computer debugging (Thank you Betty!!!)

Fan of those sweet GPUs that make model training go brrr? You can thank Frances Allen for her seminal work in program optimization, which that laid the foundation for modern optimizing compilers and automatic parallel execution

Love RL? Meet Leslie P. Kaelbling, who adapted the partially observable Markov decision process from operations research for application in artificial intelligence and robotics and developed RL-based programming tools for robot navigation.

Remember SVMs? Isabelle Guyon co-invented them, plus wrote some of the first papers on the use of machine learning for handwriting recognition using MNIST and is a co-inventor of the siamese neural networks... So many achievements!

These women, and many, many more have contributed to shaping AI in the last centuries and decades, and their contributions are often overlooked. Women still represent ~12% of researchers in AI and we still have a lot of ground to cover before achieving some semblance of diversity

Further reading and image credits:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_Rhodes
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Holberton
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Allen
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabelle_Guyon
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_Buolamwini
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing

Cc @MelMitchell1 and @alondra -- Let's shed some light on these amazing women ☀️