Rana el Kaliouby

Rana el Kaliouby was born in Cairo and grew up mostly in Kuwait, the daughter of conservative Egyptian parents who assumed she would marry young and stay close to home. She studied computer science at the American University in Cairo instead, and went on to Cambridge University for a PhD, arriving with a new husband who stayed behind in the Gulf. The marriage did not survive the distance and the long hours of research, and she has said that what struck her most in that lonely period was how attentive her laptop was to her keystrokes and how blind it was to her state of mind.

That observation became her research question. At Cambridge, and then at MIT's Media Lab under Rosalind Picard, she built systems that could read emotion from facial expression, work that grew out of tools originally designed to help autistic children interpret faces.

In 2009 she co-founded Affectiva, a spin-out from MIT that built commercial software for reading emotion, first used to test how audiences reacted to advertising, and later adapted to monitor driver alertness and distraction in cars. She has argued consistently that machines dealing with people need some grasp of feeling, not just instruction.

Affectiva was acquired by the Swedish company Smart Eye in 2021, where she became deputy chief executive. Her 2020 memoir, Girl Decoded, set the technical story against the personal one that started it.