Rana el Kaliouby, Ph.D., is a pioneer in artificial emotional intelligence (Emotion AI), the Deputy CEO of Smart Eye, and formerly, the Co-Founder and CEO of Affectiva, the acclaimed AI startup spun off from the MIT Media Lab. She grew up in Cairo, Egypt. After earning an undergraduate and masters degree in computer science at the American University in Cairo, she attended Cambridge University where she earned her Ph.D. Afterwards, she joined the MIT Media Lab as a research scientist, where she spearheaded the application of emotion recognition technology in a variety of fields, including mental health and autism. Her company Affectiva, which was acquired by Smart Eye in June 2021, works with more than a quarter of the companies in the Fortune Global 500. An acclaimed TED talk and Aspen Ideas speaker, Rana has been profiled in The New Yorker, interviewed by Tim Ferriss, named by Forbes to their list of America's Top 50 Women in Tech, and selected by Fortune for their list of 40 under 40. In 2018 she was the cohost of a PBS Nova series, and in 2019 she appeared in a YouTube Originals Series, “The Age of AI,” hosted by Robert Downey Jr. She lives just outside of Boston with her two kids.
