Rana el Kaliouby

El Kaliouby earned a bachelor's degree and Master of Science degree from the American University in Cairo, then a Ph.D. at Newnham College, Cambridge.[8]

El Kaliouby worked as a research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, helping to found their Autism & Communication Technology Initiative.[9] Her original goal was to improve human-computer interaction, but she quickly became fascinated with the possibility of applying this technology to improve human-human communication, especially for autistic people, many of whom struggle with emotional communication.[10] At the Affective Computing group of MIT Media Lab, she was part of a team that pioneered development of the "emotional hearing aid",[11] a set of emotion-reading wearable glasses which the New York Times included in their Top 100 innovations of 2006.[12] El Kaliouby demonstrates her work and is interviewed in the 2018 documentary on artificial intelligence Do You Trust This Computer?

El Kaliouby has stated that computers, while good with information, fall short when it comes to determining feelings, thus requiring manual prompting to respond to an operator's needs. Her work primarily lies in the subtle facial changes that people tend to make. She has identified 24 landmarks to the face, each moving in different ways, depending on an expressed emotion.[13] This has many applications, from linguistics to video production. Autism patients, who typically have a different array of expressions that are apart from the norm, may be able to have their moods more easily monitored by parents or caretakers. For production purposes, computer generated imagery of faces (and presumably android projects) will be able to be more realistic in the art of subtlety.

Leading Affectiva's Emotion Science team;[14] the company applies computer vision, machine learning and data science to leverage the company's facial emotion repository, which has now grown to nearly 6 million faces analyzed in 75 countries with 5,313,751 face videos, for a total of 38,944 hours of data, representing nearly 2 billion facial frames analyzed,[15] to understand people's feelings and behaviors.[16]

In 2016, she became the CEO of Affectiva.[2]

In November 2019, Affectiva was covered as a case study at Harvard Business School on the Emotion AI category with Professor Shane Greenstein.[17]

El Kaliouby was inducted into the "Women in Engineering" Hall of Fame.[14][18] She is also a member of ACM, IEEE, Association of Children's Museums, British Machine Vision Association, and Nahdet el Mahrousa.[19] Other awards include:

• 7 Women to Watch in 2014 – Entrepreneur Magazine[20]
• Mass High Tech Top 20 Women to Watch 2014[21]
• The Wired Smart List – Wired 2013[22]
• MIT TR35 2012[23]
• Smithsonian Magazine American Ingenuity Award in Technology[24]
• Forbes America's Top 50 Women In Tech 2018[25]
• BBC 100 Women in 2019[26]

El Kaliouby's memoir Girl Decoded was published in April 2020.[7]

El Kaliouby also contributed one chapter to the 2018 book Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building it by the American futurist Martin Ford.[27]

• List of Egyptian scientists

• Rana el Kaliouby at TED
• "This app knows how you feel — from the look on your face" (TEDWomen 2015)
• When algorithms grow accustomed to your face | Nov. 2013 – New York Times.[1]
• 25 Most Audacious Companies | April 2013 – Inc.[2]
• The New Face of AdTech Goes Consumer | Aug 2012 – TechCrunch.[3]
• Does Your Phone Know How Happy You Are? | June 2012 – Fast Company.[4]
• Khatchadourian, Raffi (19 January 2015). "We know how you feel: Computers are learning to read emotion, and the business world can't wait". The New Yorker.
• Rivera, Michael (26 September 2018). "Profile: Rana el Kaliouby". PBS Nova.
• el Kaliouby, Rana. "Planning to Use A.I. in 2020? You Need to Make These Resolutions First". Inc. This Morning.