Rosalind Picard

Picard was born on May 17, 1962, in Boston, Massachusetts.⁠[1]

She has said she grew up in a family that never went to church or talked about religion, and that she used to think religious people “had thrown their brains out the window.”⁠[2]

In 1984 she graduated in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.⁠[3]

Before completing her doctorate at MIT she was a member of the technical staff at AT&TAT&TAT&T (AT&T Inc.) is a telecommunications company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Its predecessor was SBC Communications, a regional holding company created in the 1984 breakup of the Bell System; SBC merged with the original AT&T Corp. in 2005 and adopted its name, and it has since operated a nationwide wireless network and fiber broadband, at one time also owning DIRECTV and WarnerMedia.Open the full entry Bell Laboratories, designing VLSI chips for digital signal processing and developing new methods of image compression and analysis.⁠[4]

In 1988 she married Len Picard; they have three sons.⁠[1]

In 1991 she received a doctor of science degree from MIT with the dissertation “Texture Modeling: Temperature Effects on Markov/Gibbs Random Fields,” supervised by Alex Paul Pentland.⁠[5]

In July 1991 she joined the MIT faculty as an assistant professor of media technology.⁠[1]

Earlier, in the MIT Media Lab technical report “Affective Computing” (TR#321), she noted that neurological studies indicate emotion is essential to human cognition and defined affective computing as “computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotions.”⁠[6]

In 1997 MIT Press published her book Affective Computing, which describes the importance of emotion in intelligence, the role of emotional communication in human relationships, and the possible effects of emotion recognition by robots and wearable computers; its second part discusses the design and construction of affective computers.⁠[7]

In 1998 she received tenure at the MIT Media Lab.⁠[4]

In 2005 she was promoted to full professor at MIT and was named an IEEE Fellow.⁠[1]

In 2007 Oxford UniversityUniversity of OxfordThe University of Oxford is a university in Oxford, England, where teaching existed in some form by 1096; it describes itself as the oldest university in the English-speaking world and is organised as a federal system of the university and dozens of self-governing colleges.Open the full entry Press published a volume containing her chapter “Toward Machines With Emotional Intelligence,” which observes that for half a century artificial intelligence research had focused on giving machines linguistic and mathematical-logical reasoning abilities.⁠[8]

In 2009 she and Rana el KalioubyRana el KalioubyRana el Kaliouby is a computer scientist and entrepreneur in emotion AI who co-founded the MIT Media Lab spin-off Affectiva with Rosalind Picard in 2009 and later became its CEO; after Smart Eye acquired Affectiva in 2021 she turned to investing and launched Blue Tulip Ventures.Open the full entry spun Affectiva out of the MIT Media Lab; it developed a webcam-based system for measuring viewers’ reactions to video and a wearable-sensor system for collecting data on sleep, stress and anxiety, and later raised a $12 million Series C round from investors including Horizons Ventures and Kleiner Perkins.⁠[9]

In February 2018 Empatica’s Embrace smartwatch was cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a medical device that detects convulsive seizures and alerts family members through a smartphone app; Picard is Empatica’s co-founder and chief scientist.⁠[10]

Earlier, after Affectiva discontinued its Q-sensor, she left the company and became chief scientist of Empatica, whose founders include the Italians Matteo Lai and Simone Tognetti and which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Milan; its Embrace wristband detects a seizure as it begins and automatically informs a parent, caregiver or friend.⁠[11]

In February 2019 she was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to affective and wearable computing.⁠[12]

On June 17, 2019, she appeared on episode 24 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, whose title covers affective computing, emotion, privacy and health; the episode introduced her as an MIT professor, director of the Affective Computing Research Group, and co-founder of Affectiva and Empatica.⁠[13]

In a 2021 interview she said that on friends’ advice she read one chapter of Proverbs a day, then read the whole Bible, and that “that changed me”; she noted that many great scientists in history have also been devout Christians.⁠[2]

On November 8, 2022, at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, she received the fifth International Prize “Lombardia è Ricerca,” worth €1 million, for research that the jury said advanced the use of computer science and AI for safety and well-being.⁠[14]

In February 2024 Empatica unveiled EpiMonitor, an FDA-cleared system for people aged 6 and up that detects possible generalized tonic-clonic seizures; Picard said Empatica has always provided the only smartwatch seizure monitors validated by the FDA.⁠[15]

In March 2025 Picard was among the honorees added to the Pathway of Progress, the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering’s installation honoring women of ECE; her profile describes her as an MIT professor, scientist, engineer, inventor, entrepreneur and author.⁠[3]

In February 2026 the MIT Jameel Clinic announced that she had received the 2026 IEEE Medal for Innovations in Healthcare Technology for pioneering contributions to wearable affective computing for health and wellbeing.⁠[16]

She is a principal investigator at the MIT Jameel Clinic, directs the MIT Media Lab’s Affective Computing Research Group, and is a named inventor on more than a hundred patents.⁠[17]

MIT Jameel Clinic: Official website: https://jclinic.mit.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[17]