Loading ...Pathbreakers of Arab America— Rana el Kaliouby
By: John Mason / Arab America Contributing Writer
This is the fifty-seventh of Arab America’s series on American pathbreakers of Arab descent. The series includes personalities from entertainment, business, sports, science, academia, journalism, and politics, among other areas. Our fifty-seventh pathbreaker is Rana el Kaliouby, an Egyptian American scientist who specializes in “affective computing.” She is a leader in the science of emotions, which brings emotional intelligence to technology. El Kaliouby is at the forefront of humanizing technology, one which helps us to connect with one another more effectively.
Rana el Kaliouby, a pioneer in decoding nonverbal language, introduced emotion and empathy to our emotion-blind digital universe
El Kaliouby was born to an Egyptian Muslim family in 1968. She earned a Bachelor’s degree and a Master of Science degree from the American University in Cairo. Rana grew up in both Egypt and Kuwait. She was raised by a conservative father who valued tradition – yet also had high expectations for his daughters – and a mother who was one of the first female computer programmers in the Middle East. A PBS/NOVA interview reported, “Even before el Kaliouby broke ground as a scientist, she broke the rules of what it meant to be an obedient daughter and, later, an obedient wife to pursue her own daring dream.”
Subsequently, Rana attended Cambridge University, where she earned her PhD. After that, el Kaliouby, now the divorced mother of two, moved to America to pursue her mission. Leading towards her mission, she joined the MIT Media Lab as a research scientist. There, “she spearheaded the applications of emotion recognition technology in a variety of fields, including mental health and autism research.” She left MIT to cofound Affectiva, the company credited with defining the field of Emotion AI. Affectiva’s technology is used by more than a quarter of the companies in the Fortune Global 500. An acclaimed TED speaker, el Kaliouby 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.
Rana’s mission is to humanize technology before it dehumanizes us. The theory behind her work is that the majority of our communication is conveyed through nonverbal cues: facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language. But that communication is lost when we interact with others through our smartphones and devices. The result is an emotion-blind digital universe that impairs the very intelligence and capabilities—including empathy—that distinguish human beings from our machines.
A review of el Kaliouby’s memoir, “Girl Decoded: A Scientist’s Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology,” is instructive. The review depicts her book as “a captivating memoir, an Egyptian American visionary and scientist provides an intimate view of her personal transformation as she follows her calling—to humanize our technology and how we connect with one another.” It further describes Rana as a “rarity in both the tech world and her native Middle East: A Muslim woman in charge in a field that is still overwhelmingly white and male.”
El Kaliouby’s mission–to humanize technology with artificial emotional intelligence, or ‘Emotion AI’
In Rana’s role as the co-founder and CEO of the Boston-based software company Affectiva, she is developing a “deep learning” platform that combines facial expression with tone of voice to infer how a person is feeling. She says that presently “our devices know who we are, where we are, what we’re doing. They have a sense of our calendar. But they have no idea what we’re feeling. It’s completely oblivious to whether you’re having a good day, a bad day. Are you stressed? Are you upset? Are you lonely?”
In response to a statement that our phones and laptops have no emotional intelligence, Rana responded: “There was one day where I was at the computer lab, and I was actually, literally in tears because I was that homesick. And I was chatting with my husband at the time and the only way I could tell him that I was really upset was to basically type, ‘I’m crying.’ And that was when I realized, all of these emotions that we have as humans, they’re basically lost in cyberspace, and I thought we could do better.”
That conversation led to Rana’s next stop, which was MIT where she continued work on a new algorithm, one that could pick up on the important features of human behavior. “Could tell whether you’re feeling happy, sad, angry, scared. You name it. It’s in your facial expressions. It’s in your tone of voice. It’s in your very nuanced kind of gestural cues. The way our face works is basically we have about 45 facial muscles. So, for example, the zygomatics muscle is the one we use to smile. Take all these muscle combinations and you map them to an expression of emotion like anger or disgust or excitement. The way you then train an algorithm to do that is you feed it tens of thousands of examples of people doing these expressions.”
El Kaliouby discussed her difficulty as a Middle Easterner and a woman in obtaining investment money for her company. She recalled one meeting where she was leading the discussion: “I walked into the room and people assumed I was the coffee lady.” As it turned out, today, Rana’s company, Affectiva, has raised millions and has a learning algorithm that can recognize 20 different facial expressions. Many of her clients are marketing companies who want to know whether their ads are working. And she’s also developing software for automotive safety.
One application she’s especially proud of involves autistic children’s struggle with the basic communication skills most people take for granted. On this project, Rana collaborated with neuroscientist Ned Sajin and his company Brain Power which allows autistic children to read the emotions in people’s faces. She described the situation with autistic children: “Imagine that we have technology that can sense and understand emotion and that becomes like an emotion hearing aid that can help these individuals understand in real-time how people are feeling. I think that is a great example of how A.I.—emotion A.I. in particular—can really transform these people’s lives in a way that wasn’t possible before this kind of technology.”
So, here we have a wonderful example of a woman of mixed cultural background, happily Egyptian American, who carved out her own path. This, even as el Kaliouby was capably revolutionizing AI’s new, critical technology. First, however, she had to decode herself, including her expression of her own emotions–learning to express and act on her own emotions. Rana is the best example of how cross-cultural forces shape and mold great people and great ideas. AI couldn’t have constructed this any better.
Sources:
–“Rana el Kaliouby,” Wikipedia Series on Arab Americans, 2024
–“Profile: Rana el Kaliouby: an Interview with,” PBS/Nova. 9/25/2018
–“Girl Decoded: A Scientist’s Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology,” by Rana el Kaliouby and Carol Colman
Amazon Book Review, Paperback, 4/20/2021
–“About the Author, Rana el Kaliouby,” Penguin Books, (no date)
–“A Conversation with Dr. Rana el Kaliouby, Author of ‘Girl Decoded’,” The Media Staff, 4/15/2021
John Mason, Ph.D., focuses on Arab culture, society, and history and is the author of LEFT-HANDED IN AN ISLAMIC WORLD: An Anthropologist’s Journey into the Middle East, New Academia Publishing, 2017. He has taught at the University of Libya, Benghazi, Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, and the American University in Cairo; John served with the United Nations in Tripoli, Libya, and consulted extensively on socioeconomic and political development for USAID and the World Bank in 65 countries.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab America. The reproduction of this article is permissible with proper credit to Arab America and the author.
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