I was born in 1980, the year Tito died, and spent my childhood watching Yugoslavia slowly come apart: inflation so bad my father's monthly salary bought a pair of socks by afternoon, sanctions, no travel, a low hum of "will the war reach us" I got good at ignoring. Meanwhile, on television, there was Beverly Hills: impossibly normal, impossibly happy teenagers. I was obsessed with the contrast. So when my father signed me up for a US exchange program, I said yes without thinking twice, and ended up living with a family in California that I still call my American family to this day: they visited me in Jersey just a few weeks ago.

​

I was 17, and it was in their house that I had my first real chance to use a computer every day. My host mum noticed my calculus results and how I couldn't stop tinkering, and told me to study computer science instead of architecture. So I could “earn a good living and still travel the world to admire the architecture anyway”. Back in Serbia, university came easily: scholarships I never applied for, and one rule I never broke: half an hour of studying every morning, no matter what was on the night before. I loved language and maths equally and could never find a degree that combined them, until my final year, when my computer science professor mentioned an optional AI course with one warning: "AI is addictive." He was right.

​

My PhD in Natural Language Processing at Sheffield followed, then seven years in academia: 50+ papers, a book, 2,200+ citations, before I joined the SRI International team behind what became Siri. In 2017 I founded Sentient Machines, building the world's first emotionally intelligent AI engine. A chance conversation two years ago led me to Jersey, and it was seeing that impact repeat itself everywhere I spoke, Singapore, the US, the UK, that led me to start Pure AI by Dr Danica.

​

Without my host mum and my professor, who stayed a mentor for years afterward and is now a close friend, I'd very likely be an architect somewhere. They noticed what I was actually good at and handed me a way to become more of it. Now I try to do the same for others: show them what's possible with AI, and help them transform the way they work and live because of it.

​

Outside AI: travel, my friends, running, yoga, skiing, and the Argentine tango floor in London where I met my partner. We have two daughters, who've become more important to me than artificial intelligence ever will be.