I always want to listen with an open mind.
Rana el Kaliouby
In online learning environments, it is often hard to tell whether a student is struggling. By the time test scores are lagging, it's often too late - the student has already quit.
Many people with autism struggle with reading nonverbal cues and acting on them. When you lose that ability to understand and process nonverbal cues, you're at a huge disadvantage socially.
I do believe I have certain strengths as a female CEO, such as having another level of awareness through emotional intelligence.
I personally believe in bringing your whole self to work and being open and transparent, even vulnerable. I believe that builds trust, loyalty, and a sense of belonging and passion.
I'm a Muslim Egyptian-American, born in Cairo. I grew up in Kuwait until the first Gulf War, when my family relocated to the United Arab Emirates. As an adult, I studied and lived in the U.K. before moving to Boston.
I do believe that if we have information about your emotional experiences, we can help you be in a more positive mood and influence your wellness.
Beyond ensuring that people everywhere have access to mental health, virtual digital assistants can act as learning companions, using their insight into what motivates and inspires you, to help you study and learn. In this way, AI could be used to level the playing field in education and help narrow socio-economic gaps around the world.
Emotion-enabled wearable glasses can help individuals who are visually impaired read the faces of others, and it can help individuals on the autism spectrum interpret emotion, something that they really struggle with.
By humanizing technology, we have this golden opportunity to reimagine how we connect with machines, and therefore, how we, as human beings, connect with one another.
People who have a higher EQ (Emotional Quotient) lead more successful professional and personal lives, are healthier, and even live longer.
In some cultures, like Middle Eastern, Egyptian, or Asian cultures, people are often hesitant to give any negative feedback.
We believe that one day Emotion AI will be ubiquitous, embedded on chips in our devices, ingrained into technology we use every day at home and at work.
If you're a content creator looking to elicit a certain emotion, we can validate that. In cases where an ad is trying to elicit humor, we can tell you if people get the jokes or not by the number of people who smile, the intensity of the smile, and the timing of the smile.
Now with our Software Developer Kit (SDK), any developer can embed Emotion AI into the apps, games, devices, and digital experiences they are building, so that these can sense human emotion and adapt. This approach is rapidly driving more ubiquitous use of Emotion AI across a number of different industries.
The real problem is not the existential threat of AI. Instead, it is in the development of ethical AI systems.
I am often asked what the future holds for Emotion AI, and my answer is simple: it will be ubiquitous, engrained in the technologies we use every day, running in the background, making our tech interactions more personalized, relevant, authentic and interactive.
To be successful, it is imperative that you not only know the organizations you work with, but more specifically, you have to know the actual people you work with within these organizations, understand what their personal goals and motivations are. In short, to be successful, you need to humanize your clients.
A lot of our communication has now become digital, and it does not mimic the natural way we have evolved to communicate with each other, so it's almost like we have this muscle, these social-emotional skills, and they're atrophying, right?
You can understand so much about how consumers perceive a brand by analyzing their spontaneous, subconscious responses.
Emotions don't disrupt our rational thinking but guide and inform it. But they are missing from our digital experience. Your smartphone knows who you are and where you are, but it doesn't know how you feel. We aim to fix that.
I've found that having role models and mentors who I resonate with is so important - a lot of people have so many questions and may not know where to go to get answers or may not have someone who can relate enough to even answer in the first place.
At Affectiva, we hire top talent - and the entire world is our search space. I take pride in the cultural diversity of our team, and we celebrate it.
Our human face happens to be one of the most powerful channels that we all use to communicate social and emotional states: everything from enjoyment, surprise, empathy, and curiosity.
My own work falls into a subset of AI that is about building artificial emotional intelligence, or Emotion AI for short.
I discovered that as a founder and now CEO, my commitment to and passion for Affectiva is super contagious. It is contagious with my team and at internal company meetings, injecting a new energy and sense of camaraderie.
We can read your heart rate from a webcam without you wearing anything - we can just use the reflection of your face, which shows blood flow.
I grew up in the Middle East, and I worry that AI increases the socioeconomic divide as opposed to closing the gap.
We need to build EQ in our AI systems because, otherwise, they're not going to be as effective as they were designed to be.
People communicate anger of course through facial expressions, but in voice, there's a wider spectrum, like cold anger and hot anger and frustration and annoyance, and that entire spectrum is a lot clearer in the voice channel.
I very purposely have an open communication culture, where I encourage employees to approach me with their ideas without dominating them.
Emotions matter. They influence all aspects of our lives - how we live, work, and play - from the decisions we make and how we communicate. Emotions also influence our overall health and well being.
I see that our emotional AI technology can be a core component of online learning systems - health wearables, even.
The field of AI has traditionally been focused on computational intelligence, not on social or emotional intelligence. Yet being deficient in emotional intelligence (EQ) can be a great disadvantage in society.
You won't remember what it was like when your technology didn't recognize when you are sad or angry.
Your emotions are very personal, as personal as your data gets.
I spent many, many hours with my computer, and it really bugged me that it was very oblivious to my emotional state. And that kind of inspired and motivated me to build an emotionally intelligent computer.
With every technology, there will be misuses of it.
There's a large percentage of mobile phones that now have a camera that's with you a lot of the time, and there's a lot of interest around those cameras as a data collection mechanism.
You want to know if people are resonating with your ad before it goes live and before you spend millions and millions of dollars. With our software, you can get a moment-by-moment readout of a viewer's emotional journey.
We recognize that your emotional information is extremely personal. And so we have veered away from all use cases where that data is being collected without your consent.
We're very interested in helping individuals on the autism spectrum cope and learn about social interactions and regulating emotions.
I think, in the future, we'll assume that every device just knows how to read your emotions.
As more and more of our lives become digital, we are fighting a losing battle trying to curb our usage of devices in order to reclaim our emotions. So what I'm trying to do instead is to bring emotions into our technology and make our technologies more responsive.
The way to solve problems in the world is to become scientists and technologists and build things that haven't been built before and discover things that people really don't know about.
I spent a lot of time wondering about the future. I am curious: when we have AI, and it becomes more mainstream, how is that going to affect the way we communicate with each other?
Without our emotions, we can't make smart decisions.
Mood-aware technologies would make personalized recommendations and encourage people to do things differently, better, or faster.
Emotion AI will be ingrained in the technologies we use every day, running in the background, making our tech interactions more personalized, relevant, authentic, and interactive.
People should have to opt in for any kind of data sharing, and they should know what the data is being used for.
