Emotions are core to everything we do.
— Rana el Kaliouby
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'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.
I remember, once I was stressed, with an upcoming paper deadline. That little Microsoft Word clippy guy would show up in my face, jumping around and asking if I needed help. It had no understanding of my emotions and had zero empathy. That got me interested in this idea of tech being responsive to our emotions.
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.
In general, in more collectivist cultures, we see that in group settings, people dampen their emotions but are very expressive when they are at home alone. In more individualistic cultures, such as North America and Europe, it's the opposite - people are more expressive in group settings than when they are by themselves.
I find solace in immersing myself in my work.
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.
Remember, don't let the pressures of doing business get in the way of what doing business is truly about: building relationships with people.
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.
Because being CEO can feel lonely, I journal religiously as a way to express my thoughts, feelings and aspirations. Looking back at earlier entries helps me reflect on challenges and celebrate progress and successes.
Integrity and being ethical is one of Affectiva's core values. This means we hold the highest standards for all we do, especially in our science and products.
Governments like China and the United Arab Emirates are investing heavily in AI and see it as a competitive advantage.
As co-founder and CEO of an AI company, I am used to there not being many women in the room, especially in AI.
Even if I have to work, scheduling breaks where I disconnect from technology can be beneficial.
I do worry that organizations and even governments who own AI and data will have a competitive advantage and power, and those who don't will be left behind.
I am part of the World Economic Forum Global Council on Robotics and AI, and we spend a fair amount of our time together as a group discussing ethics, best practices, and the like.
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.
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.
My Ph.D. is in computer vision and machine learning. I developed software that can read your emotions from your face as part of my doctorate work.
We're not interested in applications where you're spying on people.
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.
Emotion AI uses massive amounts of data. In fact, Affectiva has built the world's largest emotion data repository.
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.
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.
Success is rarely about having the best, the most, or the cheapest features in a product. Instead, it is almost always about knowing what matters to your sponsor in a client or partner account and delivering on that.
I am a firm believer that transparency goes hand in hand with collective intelligence.
I co-founded Affectiva with Professor Rosalind W. Picard when we spun out of MIT Media Lab in 2009. I acted as Chief Technology and Science Officer for several years until becoming CEO mid-2016, one of a handful of female CEOs in the AI space.
On the path to ubiquity of AI, there will be many ethics-related decisions that we, as AI leaders, need to make. We have a responsibility to drive those decisions, not only because it is the right thing to do for society but because it is the smart business decision.
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.
When a woman on your team or in your network comes up with an idea, make sure she gets credit for it.
I will occasionally take power naps on weekends and agree that they can be re-energizing.
With Emotion AI, we can inject humanity back into our connections, enabling not only our devices to better understand us, but fostering a stronger connection between us as individuals.
People should have to opt in for any kind of data sharing, and they should know what the data is being used for.
You can understand so much about how consumers perceive a brand by analyzing their spontaneous, subconscious responses.
A brow furrow is a very important indicator of confusion or concentration, and it can be a negative facial expression.
I am often asked how does being a woman affect my work at Affectiva. Honestly, I don't think it does.
In the U.S., women smile more than men. In the U.K., there's no difference between men and women.
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.
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.
This melting pot of experiences, interests, educations, backgrounds, and cultures makes the U.S. truly amazing. It's how we can come together to come up with new ideas, to collaborate, and to innovate without having to think about borders.
Make sure you give credit to those technologies adjacent to your own - even if they are your competitors.
Seeing clients as people with goals and desires helps you to understand their perspective, animating their existence beyond a line item in a sales pipeline report.
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.
From building robots and video games to coding apps that solve a problem in your community, or 3D printing in fashion tech, it is important that we explore different ways to engage girls in STEAM and also ensure that there are many, and different, women role models that will inspire our girls to pursue STEAM careers.
My own work falls into a subset of AI that is about building artificial emotional intelligence, or Emotion AI for short.
Own the leadership style that makes you you. If you are an empathetic leader by nature, embrace that.
Most of my days in the office end like this: I am in a meeting, it's running over, and I am starting to panic because if I don't leave the office right this second, I will be - yet again - late picking my kids up from school.
Like many, I am often in back-to-back meetings most of the day.
The real problem is not the existential threat of AI. Instead, it is in the development of ethical AI systems.
