About the Book

We are entering an empathy crisis. Most of our communication is conveyed through non-verbal cues - facial expressions, tone of voice, body language - nuances that are completely lost when we interact through our smartphones and other technology. The result is a digital universe that's emotion-blind - a society lacking in empathy.

Rana al Kaloubi discovered this when she left Cairo, a newly-married, Muslim woman, to take up her place at Cambridge University to study computer science. Many thousands of miles from home, she began developing systems to help her connect with her family. She started to pioneer the new field of Emotional Intelligence (EI). She now runs her company, Affectiva (the industry-leader in this emerging field) that builds EI into our technology and develops systems that understand humans the way we understand one another.

In a captivating memoir, Girl Decoded chronicles el Kaliouby's mission to humanise technology and what she learns about humanity along the way.

About the Author

Rana el Kaliouby, Ph.D. is a pioneer in artificial emotional intelligence (EI), as well as the co-founder and CEO of Affectiva, the acclaimed startup spun off from the MIT Media Lab. She grew up in Cairo, Egypt, studying an undergraduate and master's 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 applications of emotion recognition technology in a variety of fields, including mental health and autism. She left MIT to co-found Affectiva, the company credited with defining the field of Emotion AI. Her company now works with more than a quarter of the companies in the Fortune Global 500. An acclaimed TED speaker, Rana was named by Forbes to their list of America's Top 50 Women in Tech and Fortune included her in their list of 40 Under 40. In 2018 she was the cohost of a PBS Nova series on AI.