In 1998, while looking for topics for her Master's thesis at the American University in Cairo, [Rana] el Kaliouby stumbled upon a book by MIT researcher Rosalind Picard. It argued that, since emotions play a large role in human decision-making, machines will require emotional intelligence if they are to truly understand human needs. El Kaliouby was captivated by the idea that feelings could be measured, analyzed, and used to design systems that can genuinely connect with people. Today, el Kaliouby is the CEO of Affectiva, a company that's building the type of emotionally intelligent AI systems Picard envisioned two decades ago. Affectiva's software measures a user's emotional response through algorithms that identify key facial landmarks and analyze pixels in those regions to classify facial expressions.