Can AI Generate Visual Content for Social Media?

Women Leading Visual Tech: Interview with Dr. Lydia Chilton

LDV Capital invests in people building businesses powered by visual technologies. We thrive on collaborating with deep tech teams leveraging computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to analyze visual data. We are the only venture capital firm with this thesis.

Our Women Leading Visual Tech series is here to showcase the leading women whose work in visual tech is reshaping business and society.

Dr. Lydia Chilton is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, focusing on human-computer interaction and the design process from a computational standpoint. She is part of the Computational Design Lab, where she builds AI tools that enhance productivity.

Dr. Chilton received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2015, her Master’s in Engineering from MIT in 2009, and her SB from MIT in 2007. Before joining Columbia Engineering in 2017, she was a postdoctoral student at Stanford University.

Abigail Hunter-Syed spoke with Lydia about visual metaphors in creative ads, her career in academia, and AI-powered tools that she builds. This topic is relevant to this year’s LDV Insights research on the future of content creation.

Abby: How would you describe what you do to a two-year-old?

Lydia: I help people to make images that contain a message in them. If there are two ideas you want to relate, how do you convey that visually? That's hard. One way to do it is to take symbols of the two things and put them together. You can't mash them together but you make two images fit together to convey a third message.

Abby: I know that these are called “visual metaphors”. Do you have a favorite metaphor?

Lydia: The one I like the most is “The classroom was a zoo.