… such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, neural networks, and deep learning. The technology is described as simulating human behavior; …

Learn all about how they are humanizing technology, making our roads safer, and much more! My guest today is Rana el Kaliouby, and she is the CEO of Affectiva and a former professor of computer science. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background, and what you did before starting Affectiva and what the genesis of the idea? I did my PhD at Cambridge University, focusing on machine learning, and computer vision. Early on in my career, I recognized that technology's becoming really pervasive. It has a lot of IQ, a lot of cognitive intelligence, but it has literally no emotional intelligence at all. As I'm sure you know from both your personal and your professional life, EQ matters. Our emotional intelligence predicts how persuasive we are, how likable we are, our ability to motivate other individuals. I believe that that's true for technology that's interacting with us on a day to day basis.

After being away from the research on AI over the last few years, I took a deep dive over the last week into the current state of affairs. I downloaded and worked through Tutorials on Theano, Tensorflow and Torch. I read a number of scientific papers from arXiv and a book on a roadmap for machine learning, which you've probably come across. I tweeted a bunch of notes and thoughts while I was training my own Deep Learning model with new data (aka my human brain). And so what was I looking for as a result of all this research about learning?