Rana El Kaliouby

Pioneered AI emotion recognition technology to humanize machine interactions

Rana El Kaliouby is an Egyptian computer scientist and CEO of Affectiva, a company revolutionizing artificial intelligence with emotion-sensing technology. Born in Cairo and educated at the American University in Cairo and Cambridge University, she developed the world's largest emotion database containing over 8 million facial expressions and vocal recordings. Her work enables devices to recognize emotions through facial micro-expressions and vocal tones, now used in industries from automotive (BMW's driver monitoring) to mental health (autism therapy tools). In 2013, she co-founded Affectiva which has raised $35M in funding and works with Fortune 500 companies like Unilever and Kellogg's to measure consumer responses. El Kaliouby's TED Talk "Can we create emo-tech that understands us?" has 2.1M views. She authored "Emotional AI: How Machines Can Read Our Feelings" and serves on MIT's Media Lab board. El Kaliouby was named Forbes' AI Pioneer and Wired's AI Innovator.