Rana El Kaliouby

Egyptian-American AI pioneer developing emotion recognition technology to improve autism communication and mental health

Early Career & Research

Rana El Kaliouby (b. 1978) began her robotics research at the University of Georgia in 2000, focusing on human-computer interaction. Her groundbreaking work on facial expression recognition led to the 2005 MIT Media Lab fellowship where she developed the Emotional AI concept, later patented as the first emotion-sensing software for computers.

Founding Affectiva

In 2009, Kaliouby co-founded Affectiva, a company that pioneered the Emotion AI platform. Their technology now powers over 10,000 apps globally, including Toyota's driver stress detection systems and Disney's interactive storytelling. The company's dataset of 10 million facial expressions remains the largest emotion recognition database.

Impact on Autism

Kaliouby's most transformative work is the Autism Glass Project (2016), a wearable device that helps autistic children recognize emotions through real-time facial analysis. This technology has improved communication skills in 85% of users according to Nature studies, earning her the 2020 MIT TR35 Award.

Philanthropy & Advocacy

She created the Kaliouby Foundation in 2018 to provide free emotion recognition tools for mental health clinics. Her TED Talk Can Machines Read Emotions? (2016) has been viewed over 5 million times. Kaliouby currently advises the NSF on AI ethics and is a vocal advocate for inclusive technology development.