“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.”

Egyptian-American computer scientist

Rana el Kaliouby is an Egyptian-American computer scientist and entrepreneur, best known as the co-founder and chief executive of Affectiva, the emotion AI company she started with Rosalind Picard. Her work centers on computers that can recognize and respond to human emotion. As the public face of Affectiva, she has helped shape the conversation around artificial intelligence, affective computing, and how technology interprets facial expressions and other signals of feeling.