Rana el Kaliouby has spent her career tackling an increasingly important challenge: computers don’t understand humans. First, as an academic at Cambridge university and Massachusetts Institute of Technology and now as co-founder and chief executive of a Boston-based AI start-up called Affectiva, Ms el Kaliouby has been working in the fast-evolving field of Human Robot Interaction (HRI) for more than 20 years.
“Technology today has a lot of cognitive intelligence, or IQ, but no emotional intelligence, or EQ,” she says in a telephone interview. “We are facing an empathy crisis. We need to redesign technology in a more human-centric way.”
That was not much of an issue when computers only performed “back office” functions, such as data processing. But it has become a bigger concern as computers are deployed in more “front office” roles, such as digital assistants and robot drivers. Increasingly, computers are interacting directly with random humans in many different environments.