Rana el Kaliouby ( ar, رنا القليوبي; born 1978) is an Egyptian-American computer scientist and entrepreneur in the field of expression recognition research and technology development, which is a subset of facial recognition designed to identify the emotions expressed by the face. El Kaliouby's research moved beyond the field's dependence on exaggerated or caricatured expressions modeled by laboratory actors, to focus on the subtle glances found in real situations. She is the co-founder, with

Rosalind Picard Rosalind Wright Picard (born May 17, 1962) is an American scholar and inventor who is Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab, and co-founder of the startups ...

, and

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...

Affectiva Affectiva is a software company that builds artificial intelligence. The company claims its AI understands human emotions, cognitive states, activities and the objects people use, by analyzing facial and vocal expressions. An offshoot of MIT Media ...

. A pioneer in

Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

as well as the co-founder and CEO of Affectiva, an AI startup spun off from the

MIT Media Lab The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...

. After growing up in Cairo, Egypt, she earned a PhD in Cambridge University, and then joined the MIT Media Lab as a research scientist, where she spearheaded the application of emotion recognition technology in a variety of fields, including mental health and

autism The autism spectrum, often referred to as just autism or in the context of a professional diagnosis autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or autism spectrum condition (ASC), is a neurodevelopmental condition (or conditions) characterized by difficulti ...

. She left MIT to co-found Affectiva, a company credited with defining the field of Emotion AI and now works with 25% of the Fortune 500 and is a leader in emotion AI. Rana was named by ''Forbes'' to their list of America's Top 50 Women in Tech, and ''Fortune'' included her in their list of 40 under 40 and was chosen by the World Economic Forum to be a Young Global Leader and member of WEF's Future Global Council on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. She speaks regularly on ethics in AI and fighting bias in AI at conferences from the Aspen Ideas Festival to the

Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...

’s Future of Everything. She hosted a

PBS The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcasting, public broadcaster and Non-commercial activity, non-commercial, Terrestrial television, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly fu ...

Nova. Rana el Kaliouby is on a mission to humanize technology with artificial emotional intelligence, or what she calls “ Emotion AI.” through developing a “deep learning” platform that combines facial expression with tone of voice to infer how a person is feeling. She is the author of "Girl Decoded: A scientist's quest to reclaim humanity by bringing emotional intelligence to technology".

Education

El Kaliouby earned a bachelor's degree and Master of Science degree from the

American University in Cairo The American University in Cairo (AUC; ar, الجامعة الأمريكية بالقاهرة, Al-Jāmi‘a al-’Amrīkiyya bi-l-Qāhira) is a private research university in Cairo, Egypt. The university offers American-style learning programs ...

, then a Ph.D. at

Newnham College, Cambridge Newnham College is a women's Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college was founded in 1871 by a group organising Lectures for Ladies, members of which included philosopher Henry Sid ...

Career

El Kaliouby worked as a

research scientist A scientist is a person who conducts scientific research to advance knowledge in an area of the natural sciences. In classical antiquity, there was no real ancient analog of a modern scientist. Instead, philosophers engaged in the philosophica ...

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

, helping to found their Autism & Communication Technology Initiative. 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 The autism spectrum, often referred to as just autism or in the context of a professional diagnosis autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or autism spectrum condition (ASC), is a neurodevelopmental condition (or conditions) characterized by difficulti ...

people, many of whom struggle with emotional communication. At the Affective Computing group of

, she was part of a team that pioneered development of the "emotional hearing aid", a set of emotion-reading wearable glasses which the

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

included in their Top 100 innovations of 2006. El Kaliouby demonstrates her work and is interviewed in the 2018 documentary on artificial intelligence

Do You Trust This Computer? ''Do You Trust This Computer?'' is a 2018 American documentary film directed by Chris Paine that outlines the benefits and especially the dangers of artificial intelligence. It features interviews with a range of prominent individuals relevant to ...

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. 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 Computer-generated imagery (CGI) is the use of computer graphics to create or contribute to images in art, printed media, video games, simulators, and visual effects in films, television programs, shorts, commercials, and videos. The images ma ...

of faces (and presumably android projects) will be able to be more realistic in the art of subtlety. Leading Affectiva's Emotion Science team; the company applies

computer vision Computer vision is an interdisciplinary scientific field that deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to understand and automate tasks that the hum ...

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

and

data science Data science is an interdisciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract or extrapolate knowledge and insights from noisy, structured and unstructured data, and apply knowledge from data across a br ...

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, to understand people's

feelings Feelings are subjective self-contained phenomenal experiences. According to the ''APA Dictionary of Psychology'', a feeling is "a self-contained phenomenal experience"; and feelings are "subjective, evaluative, and independent of the sensations ...

and

behavior Behavior (American English) or behaviour (British English) is the range of actions and mannerisms made by individuals, organisms, systems or artificial entities in some environment. These systems can include other systems or organisms as wel ...

s. In 2016, she became the CEO of Affectiva. In November 2019, Affectiva was covered as a case study at Harvard Business School on the Emotion AI category with Professor Shane Greenstein.

Awards and recognition

El Kaliouby was inducted into the "Women in Engineering" Hall of Fame. She is also a member of ACM,

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

, Association of Children's Museums, British Machine Vision Association, and Nahdet el Mahrousa. Other awards include: * 7 Women to Watch in 2014 – Entrepreneur Magazine * Mass High Tech Top 20 Women to Watch 2014 * The Wired Smart List – Wired 2013 * MIT

TR35 The Innovators Under 35 is a peer-reviewed annual award and listicle published by ''MIT Technology Review'' magazine, naming the world's top 35 innovators under the age of 35. at ''Technology Review'' with lists of winners at technologyreview.com ...

2012 * ''Smithsonian Magazine'' American Ingenuity Award in Technology * ''

Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments and the Forbes family. Published eight times a year, it features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. ''Forbes'' also re ...

'' America's Top 50 Women In Tech 2018 *

BBC 100 Women ''100 Women'' is a BBC multi-format series established in 2013. The annual series examines the role of women in the 21st century and has included events in London and Mexico. Announcement of the list is the start of an international "BBC's women ...

in 2019

Books

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

References

External links