Picard, Choudhoury, and Schiele Named 2021 ACM Fellows Share this post

Fellowship program honors ACM members whose specific accomplishments drive innovation and make broader advances possible.

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, has named Rosalind Picard as a Fellow, for outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology. Other new Fellows with MIT connections are Professor Elchanan Mossel of MIT's Department of Mathematics; Professor Tanzeem Choudhury of Cornell Tech who completed her PhD at the Media Lab; and Bernt Schiele, a former Media Lab postdoc who is now a professor at the Max Planck Institute and at Saarland University.

The ACM Fellows program recognizes wide-ranging and fundamental contributions in areas including algorithms, computer science education, cryptography, data security and privacy, medical informatics, and mobile and networked systems, among many other areas. The accomplishments of the 2021 ACM Fellows underpin important innovations that shape the technologies we use every day.

Rosalind Picard is a scientist, engineer, author, and professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab. Picard is recognized as the founder of the field of Affective Computing, the study and development of systems and devices that can recognize, interpret, process, and simulate human affects. She has carried this research forward as head of the Media Lab's Affective Computing research group. Picard is also a founding faculty chair of MIT's MindHandHeart Initiative, and a faculty member of the MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering, an IEEE Fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Picard's inventions are in use by thousands of research teams worldwide as well as in numerous products and services. 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 Picard and her team, Empatica created the first AI-based smart watch cleared by the FDA (in Neurology for monitoring seizures) which is now helping to bring potentially life-saving help for people with epilepsy.

"This award makes me think of how blessed I am to work with so many amazing people here at MIT, especially at the Media Lab," Picard notes. "Whenever any one of us has our contributions recognized, it is also a recognition of how special a place this is."