Founder and CEO of Affectiva, Rana el Kaliouby is a pioneer at the intersection of emotion and technology. But she faced plenty of obstacles in her journey to the now-thriving Boston-based company, not least among them a cross-global move with two young children.
El Kaliouby explains this journey, and its roots in the future of technology, in her memoir Girl Decoded. The book is a testimony to how she personally came to embrace her emotions, and her quest to bring emotional intelligence to technology.
El Kaliouby tells Hayat that her mission is “to humanize technology, before it dehumanizes us.” This implies establishing mutual trust between humans and AI over time, which she refers to as a social contract. Her company, Affectiva, pioneers this artificial emotional intelligence (Emotion AI) category.
Their work allows software to detect nuanced emotions and complex cognitive states from face and voice. This promises to make technology more relatable, and help it “respond to us in a way that reflects our unique emotions and needs in a given moment.”
El Kaliouby’s work has also earned her a place on Hayat’s Ramadan Top 30 Illuminators list.
From Egypt to Cambridge to Boston
El Kaliouby began her career as a computer scientist in Egypt. She then got accepted to a PhD program at Cambridge University. At this point, she had to do “something quite unusual for a young newlywed Muslim Egyptian wife:” With the support of her then-husband, who had to stay in Egypt, she moved to England. She soon realized that she spent “more hours with [her] laptop than [she] did with any other human.”
Yet, despite “this intimacy, my laptop had absolutely no idea how I was feeling. It had no idea if I was happy, having a bad day, or stressed, confused, and so that got frustrating,” she explains. “It felt like all my emotions disappeared in cyberspace.”
The realization that technology has so much IQ, but not EQ, got her thinking. What could happen if we could amend this? She tells Hayat that her life’s work became to enable technology to “understand the people it’s interacting with,” and to “interpret and respond to people’s reactions, emotions and engagement.”
Thus began Affectiva, first as a research project out of MIT, then as a company on its own, becoming the pioneer in Emotion AI. In 2013, she would commute to Boston from Cairo every other week. Soon, they raised over 20 million of venture and strategic funding, and began to generate revenue.
Rana el Kaliouby Finds New Roots in Boston
Prior to these developments, el Kaliouby and her family envisioned her return to Egypt, where she would become a faculty member. As her own thinking evolved, and as Affectiva needed her to reach its goals, she gave the company greater focus.
Despite their best efforts to make the marriage work, el Kaliouby and her husband decided to get a divorce. This prompted her permanent relocation to Boston. “So I packed up my life and moved to the U.S. with two young children in tow,” she recalls. “Suddenly I found myself a single mom in a foreign country, with a high-pressure career and my entire support system thousands of miles away.”
“For years, I was my own worst critic. It’s taken a divorce, a cross-continental move, and a lot of missteps to learn to co-exist with the voice in my head, and to turn it into an empowering force.”
Now, the company faces a bright future and is envisioning many possibilities. She tells me that the automotive industry, mental health, education, media analytics, social robotics, among others, could all be key fields for Emotion AI in the near future.
Rana el Kaliouby Reflects in Her New Memoir
Establishing a new way forward both personally and professional opened many opportunities for el Kaliouby. She discusses these changes and her own development in her new memoir.
“People talk about balancing work and family, but the idea of ‘balance’ is a misnomer,” she says. “As a single mom, I had no choice but to blend the two.”
As she explains to me what underpins her memoir, el Kaliouby talks about how she “started to reflect on how people communicate and what empathetic communication looks like” as she “dug deeper into my work teaching computers to understand emotions.”
“This started by acknowledging my feelings to myself – recognizing if I felt lonely or guilty or happy – and then starting to feel comfortable sharing my feelings with the world.”
“I learned there’s so much power in vulnerability and in sharing our emotions.”
Purchase el Kaliouby’s memoir here.
