Rana el Kaliouby: The Arab Scientist Humanising AI
When people talk about artificial intelligence, they often mean numbers, predictions, efficiency. But Rana el Kaliouby insists on something different: empathy. She has spent her career building technology that does not just calculate, but feels, technology that can recognise emotions, respond to them, and remind us that behind every screen is a human being.
An Egyptian-American computer scientist, entrepreneur, and author, Rana is one of the world’s leading voices in humanising technology. She is the co-founder of Affectiva, the pioneer of “emotion AI,” a field dedicated to teaching machines to understand human emotions through facial and voice recognition. Her work has transformed industries, from automotive safety to mental health, while sparking urgent debates about ethics, bias, and the role of AI in our most intimate spaces.
From Cairo to Cambridge
Rana’s story begins in Cairo, Egypt, where she grew up in a conservative family that valued education and discipline. She excelled academically, but her journey was not an easy one. At a time when expectations for women often meant marriage over careers, Rana chose a different path.
Her love for technology led her to study computer science at the American University in Cairo. She later moved to Cambridge University in the UK for her PhD in computer science, specialising in affective computing, a field then in its infancy. It was here that she began to develop the systems that would eventually become Affectiva’s foundation: AI that could decode human facial expressions and emotional states in real time.
Her move to the United States, as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT’s Media Lab, marked a turning point. Immersed in an environment that valued experimentation and risk, she pushed her research beyond academia. What began as a thesis turned into a mission: to ensure technology understood human emotion as much as it understood human behaviour.
Building Affectiva and Challenging AI’s Blind Spots
In 2009, alongside Rosalind Picard, Rana co-founded Affectiva. The company’s goal was simple but ambitious: to build AI that could read emotions, helping technology better understand people. One of Affectiva’s early breakthroughs was in market research, where emotion AI could gauge consumer reactions far more accurately than surveys. Later, the company pivoted into automotive safety, embedding AI into cars to monitor drivers for drowsiness, distraction, or distress, saving lives by recognising signs of danger before humans could admit them.
But Rana’s work has always been about more than products. It is about shifting what we think AI should do.
“We’ve built technology that can diagnose cancer or navigate roads, but we haven’t taught it to empathise. Without emotional intelligence, AI will always fall short.”
She once noted.
She also became one of the most prominent voices warning about bias and misuse. In her bestselling memoir Girl Decoded and countless interviews, she presses the questions too often left unasked: Who owns the data? Who decides how emotions are interpreted? And whose emotions are erased altogether? These questions sit at the heart of AI ethics and resonate deeply with feminist critiques of technology.
She has drawn clear boundaries, refusing to let Affectiva’s technology be used for surveillance or lie detection, even when those markets promised profit.
“We don’t apply our technology in areas like security, surveillance or lie detection,”
she explained,
“because there is no opportunity for people to opt in and consent.”
In June 2021, Affectiva was acquired by Smart Eye, a global leader in AI for automotive safety. Rana joined the company as Deputy CEO, continuing her mission to scale emotion AI responsibly on an international stage.
Representation and Responsibility
For Rana, humanising AI is inseparable from diversifying the rooms where it is built. As a woman, Arab, and immigrant leading a deep tech company in Boston, she often walked into rooms where no one else looked like her. Those experiences cemented her conviction that diversity is not an add-on in technology, it is the foundation of innovation and justice.
Her advocacy extends beyond her own career. Rana mentors women in tech, invests in female founders, and speaks openly about the systemic barriers she faced. She argues that empathy is not just a feature we should build into AI, but a quality we must embed into the tech industry itself. Her story resonates for anyone who has been underestimated, overlooked, or silenced. By insisting on AI that feels, Rana is also insisting on a tech culture that sees.
Why It Matters for Justice
When Rana says that
“technology should be kind,”
she captures the core of what justice-focused AI should mean. Empathy in design is not just a soft value, it is what makes technology usable, trustworthy, and life-changing.
Rana’s vision for feminist AI overlaps powerfully with the work we do at Spring ACT. Just as she argues that technology must recognise human emotions, we believe technology must also recognise human vulnerabilities. Sophia, our chatbot for survivors of domestic violence, was designed with this same ethos: to listen without judgment, to protect privacy, and to adapt to the lived realities of those who use it.
Rana el Kaliouby is not just an AI pioneer. She is a disruptor, a storyteller, and a bridge-builder. Her life’s work reminds us that the future of AI cannot be measured only by speed or efficiency. It must also be measured by empathy. Without it, technology risks deepening isolation, especially for those already living with abuse or marginalisation. Her story shows that responsibility must be built into tech from the very beginning, and that AI, when designed with care, can become a tool of support rather than surveillance, helping people feel seen, heard, and understood.
Because when machines begin to understand emotions, perhaps we humans will remember to do the same.
– Written by Mustapha Lawal
