Rosalind Picard is the founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Lab at MIT and co-founded both Affectiva and Empatica. Both companies are aimed at using extensive AI and wearable tech to improve the lives of people with chronic illnesses and make robots act a little more human. Ironically enough, she never wanted to start any kind of company but the need for better data and better measurement tools pushed her past the point of research and into the public sphere of engineering consumer products.