Rana El Kaliouby

Pioneered emotional AI technology to humanize artificial intelligence and promote ethical development

Rana El Kaliouby is an Egyptian computer scientist and entrepreneur who co-founded Affectiva, a leading emotional artificial intelligence company. Her groundbreaking work in facial expression and emotion recognition technology has redefined human-computer interaction, earning her recognition as one of MIT Technology Review's "35 Innovators Under 35" in 2012. Born in Cairo, her academic journey led to PhD research at the University of Cambridge on multimodal emotion recognition.

In 2009, El Kaliouby co-founded Affectiva with Rosalind Picard at MIT's Media Lab. The company's emotion AI platform analyzes facial micro-expressions and voice tone to detect emotions, now used in over 12 billion interactions globally. Applications include autism therapy tools like AffectGuide, automotive safety systems, and market research for brands like Unilever and Kellogg's. By 2019, their emotion recognition accuracy reached 90% across 75 countries and 87 languages.

El Kaliouby's advocacy for ethical AI led to her co-authoring the Emotion AI Ethics Guidelines, emphasizing transparency and human oversight. Her 2015 TED Talk "Can we build an AI without bias?" has over 2 million views. She also serves on the World Economic Forum's Global AI Council and authored the memoir "Girl Decoded" detailing her journey as a Muslim woman in tech.

Her work addresses critical issues like algorithmic bias - Affectiva's dataset includes 8.6 million videos from diverse populations to avoid cultural misinterpretations. El Kaliouby's vision is to create "empathetic AI" that respects human dignity, stating: "We're not building machines to replace humans, but to understand humans better."