Leading the Robot Invasion of the Old Boys' Club

Trailblazers Week celebrates the women who have pushed boundaries and paved the way for others in their industries. Manuela Veloso grew up in Portugal in the 1960s and '70s in a household where innovations, from the moon landing to the building of a huge bridge in Lisbon, were the subject of dinner-table discussion. In 1994, she moved to the U.S. to earn a master's degree in computer science, and she went on to get her Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon. It was the golden era of artificial intelligence, the "years of deep thoughts, chess playing, hopping robots," she tells the Cut. Veloso spent more than two decades at the university, working her way up to become the head of its machine-learning department, and has been researching artificial intelligence ever since -- now as head of AI research at JPMorgan and professor emeritus at Carnegie Mellon.