Patricia Scanlon

Dr. Patricia Scanlon, Ireland's first-ever AI ambassador and Founder of SoapBox Labs, a company using AI to enable speech recognition for children.

Dr. Patricia Scanlon holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Technological University Dublin and a PhD in Speech Recognition, Signal Processing, and Machine Learning from University College Dublin.

Here is a look at her career journey:
→ She has held academic positions at Columbia University, Trinity College, and University College Dublin, and tech roles at IBM, Bell Labs, and Westpac.
→ In 2013, she founded SoapBox Labs after recognizing that leading speech recognition tools, trained on adult speech data, performed poorly for young children.
→ In 2017, she became an AI Advisor to TechIreland.

Dr. Patricia Scanlon has advocated for AI's potential to personalize education and increase accessibility. Her 2019 TED talk outlined technology's impact on young children's reading journey.

In 2022, the Irish Government appointed Dr. Scanlon as AI Ambassador to lead a national conversation about AI's benefits and risks in people's lives.

Dr. Patricia has 3 patents, 21 international peer-reviewed papers, and 400 citations. She is a Senior Member of IEEE.

She has been listed as:
* One of the World's Top 50 Women in Tech by Forbes
* A finalist for the EU Prize for Women Innovators by the European Innovation Council

Some of my favorite quotes by Dr. Scanlon:

"Maybe somebody never gets to go to college, but they can educate themselves to a certain point with AI."

"You wouldn't construct a building without regulations, nor should you build AI solutions without them."

I am a fan of anyone so well-versed in AI who also has such a humane view on its use.

Last Updated: May 2024