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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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GIRL DECODED

Rana el Kaliouby

A Scientist's Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Our Technology

In the bestselling tradition of Lab Girl, the unforgettable narrative of an Egyptian-American technology pioneer who, after getting her Ph.D. in computer science from Cambridge University, founded Affectiva, a leader in the new field of Emotion AI, to build emotional intelligence into our computers and transform how we communicate.
Ninety-three percent of meaningful communication between people is nonverbal. We glean more information from facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language than we do with language alone.

Yet the computers we use every day to share our thoughts and reach out to colleagues, clients and friends are emotionally blind when it comes to conveying our feelings and emotions. At the same time, since 2000, the time we spend on the internet each week has risen from 9.4 hours to 23.6. With so much of our lives spent online, the emotion and context behind our words is lost. Our computers and gadgets - smart as they may be - are functionally autistic when it comes to reading and rendering emotions. And as a result our society, Rana el- Kaliouby claims, has become less empathetic.

In a rich narrative into the research and developments in emotion AI, Rana el-Kaliouby shows that we are only scratching the surface of our computers' full potential. She experienced the difficulty of conveying emotions online firsthand when she moved to Cambridge from Cairo to pursue her Ph.D., and found how frustrating and lonely she was trying to maintain her marriage via email and messaging. It was that experience that steered her into her dissertation on bringing emotional intelligence to our machines.

GIRL DECODED brings together el-Kaliouby's personal story of perseverance, ingenuity and heart as a Muslim woman in a coding universe dominated by men, with her pioneering efforts to create the digital technology to read and convey our emotions and transform how we communicate.

Rana el Kaliouby, Ph.D., is a pioneer in artificial emotional intelligence (Emotion AI), as well as the co-founder and CEO of Affectiva, the acclaimed AI startup spun off from the MIT Media Lab. She grew up in Cairo, Egypt, among a family of educators. After earning an undergraduate and master's degree in computer science at the American University in Cairo, she attended Cambridge University, where she earned her Ph.D. Afterwards, she joined the MIT Media Lab as a research scientist, where she spearheaded the applications of emotion recognition technology in a variety of fields, including mental health and autism. She left MIT to co-found Affectiva, the company credited with defining the field of Emotion AI. Her company now works with more than a quarter of the companies in the Fortune Global 500. An acclaimed TED speaker, Rana was named by Forbes to their list of America's Top 50 Women in Tech, and Fortune included her in their list of 40 Under 40. In 2018 she was the cohost of a PBS Nova series on AI.
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Book

Published 2020-04-21 by Currency

Book

Published 2020-04-21 by Currency

Comments

UK: Penguin Business ; Chinese (simpl.): Citic ; Korea: Moonhak Soochup Publishing ; Poland: CeDeWu

I really enjoyed this honest story of how science actually works. The road to brilliant innovation is full of setbacks, but often the small travails are what stop us. El Kaliouby's dream was to enable computers to engage human emotions, but she needed to engage her own emotions to invent machines with emotions. Her remarkable life story is a captivating way to understand this new technological frontier: machines with emotional intelligence.

look at this recent tweet from Melinda Gates, who is also a Rana fan Read more...

Artificial intelligence is advancing exponentially. Creating a hopeful, compelling, and abundant future for humanity depends on the work outlined by entrepreneur Rana el Kaliouby in her must-read book, Girl Decoded. It is critical that we embrace a future in which technology enhances our most human qualities, specifically empathy, caring, and emotional intelligence.

A vivid coming-of-age story and a call to each of us to be more mindful and compassionate when we interact online.

You can see Rana here in her Ted Talk from 2015 Read more...

Written with kindness, vulnerability, and grace, Girl Decoded reveals the tour de force that is Rana el Kaliouby. Her must-read memoir spurs technologists to follow their conscience and emboldens women all over the globe to fight for their dreams.

As an entrepreneur and computer scientist, Rana el Kaliouby has done pioneering work to infuse technology with emotion and leverage technology to enrich our understanding of emotions. In this forthright, engaging memoir, she takes us behind the scenes of her work and through the key events that have shaped her life and worldview.

Brilliant and inspiring - words that describe both Rana el Kaliouby and her extraordinary new book, which tells the story of her life and of the crucial role she played in the invention of artificial emotional intelligence... a poignant and deeply personal tale about love, loss, and coming of age on a new scientific frontier.

This lucid and captivating book by a renowned pioneer of emotion-AI tackles one of the most pressing issues of our time: How can we ensure a future where this technology empowers rather than surveils and manipulates us?