Rana el Kaliouby is an Egyptian-born computer scientist, entrepreneur, and thought leader in artificial intelligence, widely recognized as a pioneer in the emerging field of Emotion AI — technology designed to enable machines to recognize, interpret, and respond to human emotions. Born and raised in Cairo, she earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from the American University in Cairo before moving to the United Kingdom to pursue a PhD at the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral research focused on affective computing, a discipline that combines psychology, cognitive science, and computer vision to help computers understand human emotional states.

Her work later brought her to the MIT Media Lab, one of the world’s leading interdisciplinary research centers. There, she continued developing systems capable of analyzing facial expressions and subtle nonverbal cues through machine learning and computer vision technologies. In 2009, she co-founded Affectiva as a spin-off from MIT.