Whilst we can all be consumed by the quick YouTube video or blog article for learning, sometimes it's nice to get engrossed into a good book. See more AI insights here. A Scientists Quest to reclaim our humanity by bringing emotional intelligence to technology. The recent release from Affectiva CEO and Founder, Rana el Kaliouby & Carol Colman addresses many questions including how we humanize our technology and how we connect with each other. To combat our fundamental loss of emotional intelligence online, Rana cofounded Affectiva, the pioneer in the new field of Emotion AI, allowing our technology to understand humans the way we understand one another.

Amy Barrett: So Girl Decoded was published earlier this year by Penguin Business. Can you tell me, what is your book about? Rana el Kaliouby: So my book is a memoir. It's a juxtaposition of my personal journey intertwined with my journey building emotional intelligence into technology. AB: What made you actually want to start writing it? ReK: So the initial idea was to talk about emotion A.I. or artificial emotional intelligence and kind of tease apart the different applications of the technology and the ethical and moral implications of building technology like that. But very early on, I remember meeting with the publisher Penguin, Random House, and the editor there said, you know, your story is really fascinating. I grew up in the Middle East, found my way to the US by way of studying in the UK, actually. Ane he said, that's the story, you got to interweave your personal stories. So it ended up being this, again, kind of inter woven mix of my personal background and how I went from what I call "a nice Egyptian girl" to a CEO of a tech company. AB: And what some of the biggest challenges you say you faced to getting where you are today? ReK: I think the biggest kind of challenge is that I was always kind of doing some… I'm a misfit. Like, I grew up in the Middle East, but I really wanted to be a computer scientist. I left home to do my PhD, which was quite unusual at the time because my husband at the time had to stay back in Cairo for work.

A smartphone that can warn you not to send a text while you're upset? Early in my career--back in the stone age before computers and smartphones--I worked in environments where memos were a primary means of communication. Sure, my colleagues and I could talk face-to-face, but the culture of the time was to memorialize much of our interaction in writing. Believe it or not, there were some advantages in what now seems such an archaic practice. Unlike texts and emails--where one tap of the "send" button can fill you with instant regret--the old-fashioned memo provided a cushion of safety, a chance to reconsider.

In a digital world, how do we build empathy into the algorithms that run our lives? Join us for a special virtual briefing hosted by Greg Williams, Editor of WIRED with Rana el Kaliouby, co-founder and CEO of Affectiva, and author of'Girl Decoded' as they discuss how to bring emotional intelligence to technology during a global health emergency, such as the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. Even before the coronavirus pandemic began earlier this year, the world had already moved to an increasingly digital setting. Emails, texts and social media interactions were fast-becoming the norm over physical meetings. However, words convey only a fraction of the true meaning behind a message, and as a result, we are missing key physical, non-verbal cues that give us a more complete understanding of each other.

Forbes' new list of promising artificial intelligence companies highlights how the technology is creating real value across industries like transportation, healthcare, HR, insurance and finance. Naturally, the founders of the honoree companies are excited about the technology's benefits and, in their roles, spend a lot of time thinking and talking about its strengths and limitations. Here's what they think people get wrong about artificial intelligence. Affectiva CEO Rana el Kaliouby says she's too often encountered the idea that AI is "evil." "AI--like any technology in history--is neutral," she says.

I've always had this vision too that we as humans would maybe perhaps carry with us, let's call it our emotion passport. It's our emotional digital footprint that we control.

When a CIA-backed venture capital fund took an interest in Rana el Kaliouby's face-scanning technology for detecting emotions, the computer scientist and her colleagues did some soul-searching - and then turned down the money. 'We're not interested in applications where you're spying on people,' said el Kaliouby, the CEO and co-founder of the Boston startup Affectiva. The company has trained its artificial intelligence systems to recognize if individuals are happy or sad, tired or angry, using a photographic repository of more than 6 million faces. Rana el Kaliouby, CEO of Affectiva, demonstrates their facial recognition technology. Recent advances in AI-powered computer vision have accelerated the race for self-driving cars and powered the increasingly sophisticated photo-tagging features found on Facebook and Google.

Without our emotions, we can't make smart decisions,

Artificial intelligence is a $15 billion dollar industry and growing. With more than 2,600 companies developing intelligent technology, the value of AI is expected to rise to more than $70 billion by 2020. And it's not just attracting the tech giants: USAA is using AI to protect its users from identity theft, and Under Armour has connected its health app, MyFitnessPal, to IBM Watson so users can get a more thorough read of their health. For designers, that represents a major business opportunity. But AI is also a challenge requiring every strength and skill they've learned and many they haven't.

Nowadays Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems to be on everyone's lips. This was emphasised once again at the most recent TechCrunch Disrupt event, held in San Francisco in mid-September, where the topic was raised in almost every discussion. Machine learning is a particularly fertile area of Artificial Intelligence. Danny Lange, Head of Machine Learning at Uber, believes that the best way of describing the concept – which everyone is talking about without actually knowing exactly what it involves – is to regard it as a paradigm shift. "We're moving from a Newtonian, deterministic way of writing software, where the all-knowing programmer writes a complete model of your world, and we're seeing this major shift to more of a Heisenberg world, where it's about uncertainty and probabilities. Basically we're now using experience, using data, to have learning algorithms build and use these models and get results that are really predictions with probabilities, rather than having finite deterministic programmes. And as the world changes the data changes and we rebuild the models. This allows us to continuously have a software system that is more in line with the real world," he explained to the TechCrunch Disrupt audience.