As one of eight daughters in her family, hair care has always been a struggle for Ulupreneur Ifueko Igbinedion. Since she was a child, she’s been doing her own hair—from micro braids and glue-in extensions to lace wigs. These styles often required huge investments of time and money, and became difficult to maintain as she progressed through college.
A two-time Stanford graduate and PhD student at MIT, Ifueko developed a deep passion for machine learning, computer vision, and virtual and augmented reality. When asked to build a technical solution for solving the hair-care problem for Black women, she was inspired by her own hair-care struggles and her previous technical work to develop a suite of machine learning and augmented reality algorithms that eliminate the hours of hard work required by women’s hair-care regimens. As co-founder of Hairtelligence, she believes that the beauty industry deserves a modern reboot, and is determined to bring deep technology to the backbone of future innovations in hair care, health, and beauty.
About Ifueko Igbinedion
Ifueko Igbinedion is a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in electrical engineering and computer science, and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from Stanford University. She has previously completed internships at Google and IBM focused on machine learning, virtual reality, robotics, and systems architecture. Her doctoral work centers on the use of deep learning and VR to support complex single- and multi-agent tasks in harsh environments with extremely high speed and accuracy.
