Aude Oliva
Cognitive Neuroscientist & Computer Scientist
Senior Research Scientist, CSAIL
Director of Strategic Industry Engagement, MIT Schwarzman College of Computing
MIT Director, MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab
Co-lead, MIT AI Hardware Program
Founder, Perceptual Insights Inc (piinc)
Biography: A computing bilingual scientist, with command of human and machine intelligence for over two decades
Aude Oliva is a highly multidisciplinary leader at the intersection of human and artificial intelligence, currently serving as the Director of Strategic Industry Engagement for the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. Her expertise is backed by a strong academic foundation, including a Ph.D. from the Institut National Polytechnique of Grenoble, dual M.Sc. degrees in Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Science (minor in Philosophy) following a French baccalaureate in Physics and Mathematics. She was an Expert at the National Science Foundation (CISE) focusing on computational neuroscience and AI, and at MIT, she currently serves on the committee on Research Computing and Data, in the VPR MIT Office of Research. Her LinkedIn page.
Aude Oliva is a cross-disciplinary thinker operating at the intersection of cognitive science, neuroscience, and computer science to advance the frontier of Computational Perception and Cognition. Her high-impact research leverages the synergy between human and machine intelligence to solve complex challenges in perception, attention, memory, and reasoning. She has been honored with the NSF CAREER Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship, and the 2023 Donald O. Hebb Award , among others. She is on the Scientific Advisory Board of AI2 and the MIT Press Management Board. With 200+ publications, she effectively translates interdisciplinary knowledge into tangible innovation and industrial growth. Her Google Scholar profile (h-index 88).
Strategic Leadership : A 0-1 primary architect of MIT’s modern relationship with the tech industry
Strategic Leadership & Industry Ecosystems
Aude Oliva is a primary architect of high-value collaborations at the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, where she serves as Director of Strategic Industry Engagement. She engineers multi-faceted partnerships with corporate leaders, integrating cutting-edge research, student support, and community building into a unified innovation ecosystem. Her current leadership portfolio includes leading the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, spearheading the MIT AI Hardware Program and directing student initiatives for the MIT Generative AI Impact Consortium. A trailblazer in academic-industrial synergy, she launched both the MIT-Amazon Science Hub—a landmark multi-year collaboration in AI, robotics, and computing—and the MIT-Google Program for Computing Innovation. Previously, she founded the MIT EECS Alliance, and participated to the leadership of the MIT Quest for Intelligence and the MIT-Liberty Mutual Collaboration.
MIT Director, MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab
As the MIT Director of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, Aude Oliva spearheads a pioneering, first-of-its-kind academic-industrial powerhouse dedicated to the frontier of AI research and application. Under her leadership, the Lab manages a high-impact portfolio of AI projects, translating AI/ML research into a continuous stream of patents, top-tier publications, and real-world business applications. Her nine-year tenure has seen the Lab fund more 215+ research projects, yielding 1,500+ peer-reviewed publications and over 185,000 citations, resulting in a world-class Lab h-index of 190. In her role, she has championed the development of the next generation of talent, securing funding and professional pathways for 500+ MIT students and postdocs through research assistantships, internships, and undergraduate research opportunities.
Entrepreneurship: Mastering the translation layer between human perception and AI
Founded by Zoya Bylinskii and Aude Oliva, Perceptual Insights Inc. (piinc), is a science-driven firm, applying the rigor of perceptual and cognitive research to AI enterprises. Perceptual Insights Inc. helps frontier AI labs evaluate and improve their models, and helps enterprises and investors independently benchmark which AI models actually perform best for real-world use cases — not just on leaderboards. Think of piinc as the translation layer between how humans actually see, hear, and reason, and how AI systems get built and evaluated.
piinc collaborates with a Scientific Advisory Network of leading academics and frontier researchers in perception, cognition, and human-centered AI, covering the multimodal spaces of vision, audio, tactile, language, and reasoning. The Insighters bring their scientific perspective and thought partnership to real-world AI development, supporting evaluation strategy, research-informed decision-making, and human-centered model design. If you are interested in joining the network, fill up the contact form on Perceptual Insights Inc.