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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.
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.
I'm a Muslim Egyptian-American, born in Cairo. I grew up in Kuwait until the first Gulf War, when my family relocated to the United Arab Emirates. As an adult, I studied and lived in the U.K. before moving to Boston.
Success is rarely about having the best, the most, or the cheapest features in a product. Instead, it is almost always about knowing what matters to your sponsor in a client or partner account and delivering on that.
Because being CEO can feel lonely, I journal religiously as a way to express my thoughts, feelings and aspirations. Looking back at earlier entries helps me reflect on challenges and celebrate progress and successes.
Emotion-enabled wearable glasses can help individuals who are visually impaired read the faces of others, and it can help individuals on the autism spectrum interpret emotion, something that they really struggle with.
I discovered that as a founder and now CEO, my commitment to and passion for Affectiva is super contagious. It is contagious with my team and at internal company meetings, injecting a new energy and sense of camaraderie.
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.
Most of my days in the office end like this: I am in a meeting, it's running over, and I am starting to panic because if I don't leave the office right this second, I will be - yet again - late picking my kids up from school.
Emotions don't disrupt our rational thinking but guide and inform it. But they are missing from our digital experience. Your smartphone knows who you are and where you are, but it doesn't know how you feel. We aim to fix that.
People communicate anger of course through facial expressions, but in voice, there's a wider spectrum, like cold anger and hot anger and frustration and annoyance, and that entire spectrum is a lot clearer in the voice channel.
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.
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 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.
I've found that having role models and mentors who I resonate with is so important - a lot of people have so many questions and may not know where to go to get answers or may not have someone who can relate enough to even answer in the first place.
I am often asked what the future holds for Emotion AI, and my answer is simple: it will be ubiquitous, engrained in the technologies we use every day, running in the background, making our tech interactions more personalized, relevant, authentic and interactive.
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.
On the path to ubiquity of AI, there will be many ethics-related decisions that we, as AI leaders, need to make. We have a responsibility to drive those decisions, not only because it is the right thing to do for society but because it is the smart business decision.
If you're a content creator looking to elicit a certain emotion, we can validate that. In cases where an ad is trying to elicit humor, we can tell you if people get the jokes or not by the number of people who smile, the intensity of the smile, and the timing of the smile.
Now with our Software Developer Kit (SDK), any developer can embed Emotion AI into the apps, games, devices, and digital experiences they are building, so that these can sense human emotion and adapt. This approach is rapidly driving more ubiquitous use of Emotion AI across a number of different industries.
To be successful, it is imperative that you not only know the organizations you work with, but more specifically, you have to know the actual people you work with within these organizations, understand what their personal goals and motivations are. In short, to be successful, you need to humanize your clients.
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.
From building robots and video games to coding apps that solve a problem in your community, or 3D printing in fashion tech, it is important that we explore different ways to engage girls in STEAM and also ensure that there are many, and different, women role models that will inspire our girls to pursue STEAM careers.
In general, in more collectivist cultures, we see that in group settings, people dampen their emotions but are very expressive when they are at home alone. In more individualistic cultures, such as North America and Europe, it's the opposite - people are more expressive in group settings than when they are by themselves.
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.