Rana el Kaliouby

In the U.S., women smile more than men. In the U.K., there's no difference between men and women.

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.

I am a firm believer that transparency goes hand in hand with collective intelligence.

I do believe I have certain strengths as a female CEO, such as having another level of awareness through emotional intelligence.

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?

Beyond ensuring that people everywhere have access to mental health, virtual digital assistants can act as learning companions, using their insight into what motivates and inspires you, to help you study and learn. In this way, AI could be used to level the playing field in education and help narrow socio-economic gaps around the world.

My own work falls into a subset of AI that is about building artificial emotional intelligence, or Emotion AI for short.

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.

With Emotion AI, we can inject humanity back into our connections, enabling not only our devices to better understand us, but fostering a stronger connection between us as individuals.

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.

I see that our emotional AI technology can be a core component of online learning systems - health wearables, even.

I co-founded Affectiva with Professor Rosalind W. Picard when we spun out of MIT Media Lab in 2009. I acted as Chief Technology and Science Officer for several years until becoming CEO mid-2016, one of a handful of female CEOs in the AI space.