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.
— Rana el Kaliouby
Without our emotions, we can't make smart decisions.
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.
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.
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.
With every technology, there will be misuses of it.
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.
You won't remember what it was like when your technology didn't recognize when you are sad or angry.
People who have a higher EQ (Emotional Quotient) lead more successful professional and personal lives, are healthier, and even live longer.
I do believe I have certain strengths as a female CEO, such as having another level of awareness through emotional intelligence.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I think, in the future, we'll assume that every device just knows how to read your emotions.
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.
In some cultures, like Middle Eastern, Egyptian, or Asian cultures, people are often hesitant to give any negative feedback.
I always want to listen with an open mind.
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.
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 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.
Mood-aware technologies would make personalized recommendations and encourage people to do things differently, better, or faster.
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.
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.
We're very interested in helping individuals on the autism spectrum cope and learn about social interactions and regulating emotions.
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.
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.
Your emotions are very personal, as personal as your data gets.
I see that our emotional AI technology can be a core component of online learning systems - health wearables, even.
I very purposely have an open communication culture, where I encourage employees to approach me with their ideas without dominating them.
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?
