Rana el Kaliouby — Egyptian-American computer scientist and pioneer of 'emotion AI,' co-founder and CEO of Affectiva. She holds a PhD from Cambridge, did a postdoc at MIT, and wrote the memoir Girl Decoded.
The gist
Rana el Kaliouby traces how Rosalind Picard's book Affective Computing changed her life and set her on a path to building technology that reads human emotions. She discusses growing up in a conservative-yet-liberal Egyptian family, wearing the hijab for 12 years and then removing it, commuting between Cairo and Boston, and her divorce. The conversation covers Affectiva's applications in autism, mental health, market research, and automotive driver monitoring, plus the company's refusal to take government surveillance and lie-detection money. Throughout, she connects her work decoding machine emotions to a personal journey of learning to acknowledge and embrace her own feelings, aided heavily by journaling. The episode closes on the importance of diverse data and teams, human-centric AI, and her billboard message: embrace your emotions.
Big reveals
- Rana's fiance found Rosalind Picard's book Affective Computing on Amazon; it took 3 months to ship to Cairo and got held in customs, but reading it changed the trajectory of her life and became her research obsession.
- Rana met Picard when she visited Cambridge UK; Picard invited her to MIT as a postdoc, and Rana ended up commuting from Cairo to Boston for 3-4 years.
- Rana chose to wear the hijab at 22-23 after a close family friend's sudden death, wore it for 12 years, and removed it in 2012 amid divorce, the Muslim Brotherhood rolling back women's rights, and a desire for a 'Rana 2.0.'
- Affectiva turned down roughly $40 million from an intelligence agency that wanted it to pivot to lie detection and surveillance, even while nearly running out of money, because it didn't match their North Star.
- During the 2009 Sand Hill Road pitch tour, Rana's babysitter bailed, so she handed her 6-month-old son Adam to a front-desk assistant and went into the investor meeting anyway.
- Affectiva's first check came from the Wallenberg family of Sweden; they later raised from Kleiner Perkins (with Mary Meeker on the board) and got an unsolicited inbound investment from Solina Chau of Li Ka-shing's Horizons fund.
- The book started as an AI book but pivoted to a memoir after editor Roger Scholl at Penguin Random House heard her personal story and said 'That's the book.'
- Rana broke down narrating the audiobook section about her father; her mother and sisters told her an early draft portrayed him too negatively, forcing her to re-examine the relationship.
Things worth remembering
- Machine learning is described as a subcategory of computer science that serves as a mechanism to implement artificial intelligence.
- Less than 10% of human communication is the actual words (text); about 90% is non-verbal: facial expressions, hand gestures, and vocal intonations.
- Rana conceived of an 'emotional prosthetic' (akin to a hearing aid for EQ) using camera glasses, before Google Glass existed, to help autistic children read others' expressions in real time.
- The company Brain Power has deployed about 400 Google Glass devices using Affectiva's technology to give autistic kids real-time visual feedback.
- Mental health diagnosis still relies on subjective surveys (rating depression or suicidal feelings 1 to 10), while strong facial and vocal biomarkers exist for depression, suicidal intent, and Parkinson's.
- The company was named 'Affectiva' (affect being a synonym for emotion) specifically to avoid the 'E-word' when pitching male-dominated Silicon Valley investors.
- Psychologist John Gottman can predict divorce from seconds of couple footage by spotting expressions like an upper-lip raise, a sign of contempt.
- Rana journals openly in the Day One app; reviewing entries, her most frequent words were 'lonely' and 'fear,' and she uses past entries to remind herself that hard times pass.
- Rana frequently gifts Ryan Holiday's The Obstacle Is the Way; Tim reveals he published the audiobook version of it.
- Affectiva's emotion tech is deployed in about 90 countries, requiring diverse data sets and diverse teams (including a high-school intern program and an art-historian CMO) to work cross-culturally.
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Affective Computing
Rosalind Picard
“And I read it, and uh you know, I think it's safe to say that it changed my life because” — Rana el Kaliouby 00:02:49Find it on Amazon
Girl Decoded
Rana el Kaliouby
“Rana el Kaliouby, PhD, who's also co-founder and CEO of Affectiva and author of the new book Girl Decoded” — Tim Ferriss 00:00:15Find it on Amazon
The Obstacle Is the Way
Ryan Holiday
“I've recently been gifting I must have given this book to at least like three or four people cuz I recently read it. Uh The Obstacle Is the Way.” — Rana el Kaliouby 00:57:18Find it on Amazon
The Namesake
Jhumpa Lahiri
“my favorite book, which I've now read a few times also, is uh Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake.” — Rana el Kaliouby 01:02:58Find it on Amazon
Little, Big
John Crowley
“So it's this book here which is I'll read it. Little Big so little little , big by John Crowley.” — Tim Ferriss 01:06:42Find it on Amazon
Day One
Bloom Built (inferred)
“So, I use an app called Day One. And um I started I've now been journaling, I would say, eight or nine years pretty consistently.” — Rana el Kaliouby 00:57:18Find it on Amazon