TechMAKERS

MAKERS sits down with Fei-Fei Li, a tech rock star who stood up to the AI community to develop a project about machine learning she was sure would push the field further-and it did. In 2006, she launched the ImageNet project to teach machines how to "see" objects. "We got scathing reviews. I didn't spend too much time thinking 'should I do it or not' because I knew in my mind this will change how we think about machine learning." Today, her work is recognized as a key turning point in AI development. Li was born in Cheng Du, China, where cloudy skies were the norm. This sparked an interest in the power of nature that grew into a passion for understanding the world through STEM. "As I entered school, the sheer beauty of math and science attracted me." In 1992, 16-year-old Li and her family emigrated to the U.S., facing a world of change. "I pretty much had to learn English from scratch. I had to carry all these dictionaries to survive my day." Just two years later, she'd earned a near full-ride to Princeton University and went on to earn a Ph.D. from Caltech. Her goal is to ensure tomorrow's brave new world will have feminism built in. But right now women earn only less than 20% of the computer science degrees. Li sees this imbalance as a threat to how technology helps society and advocates for change. "We need to be mindful that human values define machine values. If our training data misses a big population of our world, that would have grave consequences."

Ayanna Howard sits down with MAKERS to discuss work as a groundbreaking robotic engineer, entrepreneur and educator. Howard's parents were techies, but as a child it was a fictional character that inspired her tech focus. "When I saw the Bionic Woman, I was totally fascinated. Here was this beautiful person who was saving the world with these things called bionics. You had the technology, which I always resonated with, but you had the social impact." After finishing her Ph.D. at the University of Southern California, Howard joined at NASA at 27. She was ready for the science. The sexism was another thing. "I come into the room, and there was an engineer and he was like, 'Oh, you're not supposed to be here. You need to go down the hall where the secretaries are.'" Instead, she went on to lead her team in building Mars rovers. In 2005, Howard started her own lab at Georgia Tech, with the goal of revolutionizing health care for children with special needs through robotic therapy. She wasn't sure if the medical community would embrace the idea, but an early trial session erased all her doubts. While working with a child struggling with multiple sclerosis, he played with one of Howard's robots and "there was this smile on the kid's face . . . I was like 'We are definitely doing the right thing.'" Howard has brought real heart to hardware. In her work pioneering robotic therapy for special needs kids, she launched an industry that perfectly fuses tech with positive change. And though she's a rocket scientist intellect, she's cool enough to admit a TV show set her on her path.

MAKERS sits down with Diana Trujillo to discuss her journey from Colombia to working as a NASA engineer. Trujillo was born in Cali, Colombia, where a love of space gave her hope on earth. "We'd boil an egg and cut it in half and that was our lunch that day. I remember just laying down on the grass and looking up at the sky and thinking there has to be something out there better than this." At 17, she left for America to find out. She didn't let borders or biases stop her from pursuing her passion for space exploration. She landed in America with no immigration papers and no English, yet within just a few short years, she was completing an engineering degree and won a spot at NASA Academy. It was a victory that came with culture shock. "I was the first immigrant, Hispanic woman in the program. I was coming in scared, unsure with no confidence whatsoever. I got to meet astronauts, CEOs of companies. None of them looked like me." That didn't stop her from being one of only two in her class to be hired by NASA in 2008. Trujillo worked as a communications engineer on the 2012 Mars Curiosity Rover program. Translation: It was her job to make sure Curiosity could communicate with Earth. When the first images came through, "I could not believe we had done it," Trujillo recalls. "I am one of the first 30 people in the world to see Mars." Today, she's overseeing a rover tool used in collecting surface samples on the Red Planet. Trujillo's journey from Colombia to Curiosity is the kind of story America was built on. "I am the person that came from another country trying to figure out a better life in a different place and then took that little seed and expanded it to taking the entire human species into the next level of exploration."

MAKERS sits down with Limor Fried to discuss her life as an engineer and entrepreneur. She designs electronics, runs a business, has millions of followers on social media and launched that other makers movement-the one focused on building stuff. Limor Fried earned a degree from MIT and wears glasses, but with her pink locks, SoHo style and high energy, she's redefining what a tech innovator looks and acts like. Fried grew up outside of Boston and shared a passion for electronics with her father. "My father is a professor of mathematics. He would bring home these early computers, so I naturally spent time with them. I loved being creative, and I loved building stuff, making stuff, and taking stuff apart, understanding how they work." When Fried landed at MIT, everyone shared code. She took it a step further, sharing her electronic gadgets and launching the "open-source" hardware movement. "I was soaking in this idea: if you're creating new technology, new capabilities, you have to give it away. Otherwise, you're being kind of selfish." She'd post online what she'd built and sell kits so others could build it, too. Today, her company Adafruit Industries-named after computer programming pioneer Ada Lovelace-sells kits for making everything from clocks to illuminated costumes. In 2011, Fried was the first female engineer featured on the cover of Wired. (What took so long?!) "The traditional image of an engineer is being changed. Right now, the people who are building electronics in my community, they're not what people would traditionally look at as an engineer." But that's all about to change. One young girl who avidly watches Fried's online workshops, recently turned to her dad and said, "Wow, this is so cool. Can boys be engineers, too?"

MAKERS sits down with Mary Lou Jepsen to discuss her life and career as an inventor and tech executive. Jepsen grew up on a working farm in Connecticut, where her early academic success wasn't entirely understood or appreciated. "As a child I really loved two subjects the best and they were math and art. I think I was doing calculus by eighth grade independently. It wasn't really celebrated in my family." Jepsen got hooked on holography at Brown University and went on to MIT on a mission to create the first moving holograms. "The first public talk I gave, a guy stood up and just reamed into my presentation and said it would never work." It did. In 1989, her team unveiled the world's first holographic video system. While pursuing her Ph.D., Jepsen was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor that forced her to drop out. "I couldn't even subtract," she recalls. After the tumor was removed, Jepson renewed her pursuits in tech but with a new purpose: "To solve the big problems in the world." In 2004, Jepsen launched a low-cost, low-power laptop that could bring technology to children in the most underdeveloped areas of the world. The doubters this time were pretty big names. "Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Craig Barrett, all said it wouldn't work." But the UN backed the One Laptop Per Child program. Today more than two million children are learning with these devices in their classrooms. Jepsen cried the first time someone challenged her work, but now facing opposition is just part of her process. "It's okay to get the criticism. I hear that for every project and product I've done, and literally within two to three years, I ship the very thing they said was impossible." Every time she hears "it can't be done," she answers with a technological breakthrough that changes the world. Moving holographic images? Done. A low-cost laptop that works in rural villages? Check. Wearable brain scan tech? On its way. There's just no stopping Jepsen, and we can't wait to see the next impossible things she makes possible.