Carol E. Reiley

Carol Elizabeth Reiley (born 1982) is an American business executive, computer scientist, and model.

She is a pioneer in teleoperated and autonomous robot systems in surgery, space exploration, disaster rescue, and self-driving cars.

Reiley has worked at Intuitive Surgical, Lockheed Martin, and General Electric.

She co-founded, invested in, and was president of Drive.ai, and is now CEO of a healthcare startup, a creative advisor for the San Francisco Symphony, and a brand ambassador for Guerlain Cosmetics.

She is a published children's book author, the first female engineer on the cover of MAKE magazine, and is ranked by Forbes, Inc, and Quartz as a leading entrepreneur and influential scientist.

Carol Elizabeth Reiley was born in Flint, Michigan, in 1982.

Her family soon moved to Vancouver, Washington.

Her father is an engineer and her mother a flight attendant; Reiley credits both for her interest in technology and global humanitarian work.

She has a younger brother who is also an engineer.

Reiley's parents are from Taipei and she grew up in a Mandarin-speaking household.

Reiley's first invention was a humane mousetrap she fashioned at age eight to catch her runaway pet hamster.

She started her first business at age ten, inspired by the Babysitters Club book series.

Her first professional job was at age 15 as a television personality on Homework Helpline, a local cable show geared toward K-12 graders, answering math and English questions on the air.

Reiley received her B.S. degree in computer engineering from Santa Clara University in 2004 with a concentration in robotics research, and an M.S. degree in computer science from Johns Hopkins University in 2007, specializing in haptics.

She then enrolled in a Ph.D. program (ABD) specializing in computer vision/artificial intelligence.

She spent a year at Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Lab with her Ph.D. advisor, who was on sabbatical there.

She dropped out to move to Silicon Valley while writing her dissertation because she had a startup idea to pursue.

She was an instructor at Johns Hopkins University, co-teaching intersession courses Haptics For Surgical Robotics (2006) and Developing Facebook Apps (2009).

Reiley is a serial entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist.

Reiley was named a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow (2008–2010) to research strategies for improving human and robotic interaction for her PhD. She was elected to serve on the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society board in 2008–09 to put together key initiatives for thousands of graduate researchers.

She was the youngest member to serve on the board.

Reiley married Andrew Ng in 2014.

The MIT Tech Review named Ng and Reiley an "AI power couple."

Their engagement announcement was featured in IEEE Spectrum.

They have two children.

Reiley has built products for surgical robotic systems at Intuitive Surgical, space robotic systems at Lockheed Martin, and self-driving cars at drive.ai.

She founded the education company Squishybotz and is the author and publisher of Making a Splash (2015), a children's book about growth mindset.

In 2015, Reiley co-founded and was president of Drive.ai.

She was the initial investor and seed funded the company from her wedding fund.

She still serves on the board and is an advisor to drive.ai, but in 2018 started a healthcare startup.

Reiley sits on the technical advisory board of Harman Kardon and the Santa Clara University Engineering Advisory Board.

She is a limited partner of Sequoia Capital and AI2 Incubator, and advises/invests in several startups.

In 2018 she joined All Raise, a nonprofit diversity and inclusion organization, as a mentor and a Founder for Change.

She is also part of NEO, a mentorship community and VC fund founded by Ali and Hadi Partovi that brings together tech veterans to accelerate tomorrow's leaders.

Reiley has given two Ted talks and been a featured speaker at the MIT Technology Review Conference, The Atlantic, the World Government Summit, the Microsoft CEO Summit, and the USA Science and Engineering Festival.

She has been a guest contributor to IEEE Spectrum, Techcrunch, and MIT Tech Review.

Reiley started her freshman year in college by doing underwater robotics research and getting a scuba license.

Her research continued for several years, and her interest expanded to haptics and industrial robotic arms.

She was selected as a Computing Research Association Distributed Undergraduate Research Fellow.

As of 2018, Reiley has eight technical patents, and has authored more than a dozen papers published in various scientific conference proceedings, refereed journals and conferences.