Rana el Kaliouby

A lot of our communication has now become digital, and it does not mimic the natural way we have evolved to communicate with each other, so it's almost like we have this muscle, these social-emotional skills, and they're atrophying, right?

I spent many, many hours with my computer, and it really bugged me that it was very oblivious to my emotional state. And that kind of inspired and motivated me to build an emotionally intelligent computer.

Our human face happens to be one of the most powerful channels that we all use to communicate social and emotional states: everything from enjoyment, surprise, empathy, and curiosity.

This melting pot of experiences, interests, educations, backgrounds, and cultures makes the U.S. truly amazing. It's how we can come together to come up with new ideas, to collaborate, and to innovate without having to think about borders.

By humanizing technology, we have this golden opportunity to reimagine how we connect with machines, and therefore, how we, as human beings, connect with one another.

At Affectiva, we hire top talent - and the entire world is our search space. I take pride in the cultural diversity of our team, and we celebrate it.

There's a large percentage of mobile phones that now have a camera that's with you a lot of the time, and there's a lot of interest around those cameras as a data collection mechanism.

You want to know if people are resonating with your ad before it goes live and before you spend millions and millions of dollars. With our software, you can get a moment-by-moment readout of a viewer's emotional journey.

In online learning environments, it is often hard to tell whether a student is struggling. By the time test scores are lagging, it's often too late - the student has already quit.

Make sure you give credit to those technologies adjacent to your own - even if they are your competitors.

As more and more of our lives become digital, we are fighting a losing battle trying to curb our usage of devices in order to reclaim our emotions. So what I'm trying to do instead is to bring emotions into our technology and make our technologies more responsive.

With every technology, there will be misuses of it.