human-centered-ai
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Fei-Fei Li Taught Machines to See. Now She Wants Them to Find Their Way Around.
The scientist who gave AI a visual vocabulary is now asking it to understand rooms, movement and the physical world. A pending $8.2 billion deal with AMD brings that question to the chipmaker’s doorstep.
Tina Starr and the Human in the Machine
The Choozle CEO has a crisp answer to advertising's automation fever: keep people in charge, make the machinery legible, and measure what the money actually does.
Priya Sathiyam Wants the Future to Pass the Child Test
She began in software, discovered design at 25, and has spent the years since teaching companies, children, and AI teams to notice the people behind the interface.
Jen Snell Learned to Market AI Before AI Learned to Talk Back
Before chatbots became a category, Jen Snell was teaching companies how to give machines a useful voice. Two decades later, the Babel Street CMO is still translating between technical possibility and human judgment.
Jenny Shao Left a White Coat for a Memory Machine
She spent years studying how people remember, then walked away from a mapped-out medical career to ask a stranger question: what would software become if it could carry the history of a relationship?
Doug Kreuzkamp Went From Conducting Music to Orchestrating Airports
He studied music, practiced law, pushed wheelchairs and cleaned 747s. Then Doug Kreuzkamp built Springshot around a deceptively practical idea: the best operations software should feel less like an order and more like a well-conducted ensemble.
Katy Bunn Is Making the Customer the Meeting’s Most Important Voice
After a decade helping Paycor grow from a regional HR company into a public business acquired by Paychex, Katy Bunn has a new brief: turn marketing from an order-taking function into a source of customer truth.
Kanjun Qiu
Kanjun Qiu is the co-founder and CEO of Imbue, a San Francisco AI research lab building agents that reason and code while keeping humans at the helm. A CS grad from MIT who once funded her studies writing high-frequency trading algorithms, she was Dropbox's first chief of staff, co-founded the ML recruiting startup Sourceress, and now runs a lab that raised over $200M (Series B, backers including Nvidia) at a valuation north of $1 billion. She's also a general partner at Outset Capital, a Sequoia Scout, and co-author of Sew Electric, a book that teaches kids computer science through sewing.
Abhay Agarwal
Abhay Agarwal is the founder and CEO of Poly, the intelligent cloud file browser built to replace Finder and File Explorer for the AI era. A former Microsoft Research AI fellow and Stanford d.school lecturer, he came up through engineering at UC Berkeley and design at Stanford, then founded the human-centered AI consultancy Polytopal before pivoting it into a Y Combinator-backed startup. In November 2025, Poly emerged from stealth with $8M in seed funding led by Felicis, powered by its own Polyembed-v1 embedding model. Agarwal describes the product as 'an LLM with infinite context from your life,' and frames his life's work around a theory he calls Post-Cognitive Design.
Min Lee
Min Lee is the founder, CEO and president of IPMD, Inc., a San Mateo emotional-AI company born at UC Berkeley in 2016. He led the build of EchoAI (also known as Project M), a human-centered emotional-AI platform that reads facial micro-expressions, tone, and language to classify human emotion with a reported 96% comprehension rate - trained over 130,000 hours by a team of roughly 500 collaborators. In 2025 he was named a Visionary CEO in Emotional AI by Business Worldwide Magazine.
Nilou Salehi
Niloufar (Nilou) Salehi is a computer scientist and entrepreneur who co-founded Across AI, a San Francisco startup building 'agentic memory' systems for enterprise sales teams. An associate professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information known for human-centered AI and social computing research, she put her professorship on pause to serve as Across AI's Chief Product Officer. Across came out of stealth in December 2024 with a $5.7M seed round co-led by Cota Capital and Village Global. Her academic work spans crowd-worker organizing (Dynamo), reliable machine translation for high-stakes settings, and equity in algorithmic systems.
Leigh-Margaret Stull
Leigh-Margaret Stull is the CEO of Mural, the visual work platform trusted by 95% of Fortune 100 companies. Appointed in July 2024, she brought over 25 years of operational and product leadership to the role, having previously served as COO and CPO at CareerBuilder. A Kentucky native now based in San Francisco, she is driving Mural's AI-first strategy around the conviction that empathy, creativity, and trust are the capabilities AI can amplify but never replace.
Sean White
Sean White is the CEO of Inflection AI, the Palo Alto public benefit corporation behind the empathetic chatbot Pi. He took over in March 2024 after co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and most of the team left for Microsoft, and has since rebuilt the company around emotionally intelligent enterprise AI that runs on-premises. A Stanford- and Columbia-trained computer scientist with a deep background in augmented reality and wearable computing, White was previously Chief R&D Officer at Mozilla and head of the Interaction Ecologies Group at Nokia.
Vishal Sikka
Vishal Sikka is the founder and CEO of Vianai Systems, an enterprise AI company he started in 2019. A Stanford-trained computer scientist, he previously created SAP HANA as SAP's first-ever CTO and led Infosys as its first non-founder CEO. He sits on the boards of Oracle and BMW Group, advises Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute, and has championed the idea that AI should amplify - not replace - human creativity.