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Rosalind Picard elected as a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors

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Rosalind Picard has been named to the 2021 class of Fellows of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), with MIT colleagues Vladimir Bulović, Paula T. Hammond, and Alexander H. Slocum. 

The NAI Fellows Program highlights academic inventors who have demonstrated a spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on the quality of life, economic development, and the welfare of society. 

To date, NAI Fellows hold more than 48,000 issued US patents, which have generated over 13,000 licensed technologies and companies, and created more than one million jobs. In addition, over $3 trillion in revenue has been generated based on NAI Fellow discoveries.

The 2021 Fellows represent 116 research universities and governmental and non-profit research institutes worldwide. They collectively hold over 4,800 issued US patents. Among the new class of Fellows are 33 members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (including Dr. Picard), and three Nobel Laureates, as well as other honors and distinctions. Their collective body of research and entrepreneurship covers a broad range of scientific disciplines involved with technology transfer of their inventions for the benefit of society. This year’s class also reflects NAI’s dedicated efforts to promote diversity and inclusion in its membership, with the addition of three outstanding academic female black inventors. 

Rosalind Picard is a scientist and engineer,  founder and director of the Media Lab's Affective Computing research group, founding faculty chair of MIT's MindHandHeart Initiative, and a faculty member of the MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering. She has co-founded two companies:  Affectiva (now part of Smart Eye), providing emotion AI technologies now used by more than 25 percent 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 alert to bring potentially life-saving help for people with epilepsy. 

Dr. Picard is an active inventor with patents including wearable and non-contact sensors, algorithms, and systems for sensing, recognizing, and responding respectfully to human affective information. Her inventions have applications in autism, epilepsy, depression, PTSD, sleep, stress, dementia, autonomic nervous system disorders, human and machine learning, health behavior change, market research, customer service, and human-computer interaction, and are in use by thousands of research teams  worldwide as well as in many products and services.

The 2021 new Fellows will be inducted at the Fellows Induction Ceremony at the 11th Annual Meeting of the National Academy of Inventors this upcoming June in Phoenix, Arizona.

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