Girl decoded - Rana El Kaliouby

'Bold, inspired and hopeful' Arianna Huffington, founder and CEO of Thrive Global

'Lucid and captivating' Max Tegmark, professor of physics at MIT and author of Life 3.0

A captivating memoir that chronicles one woman's mission to humanise technology and what she learns about humanity along the way.

Now more than ever, we find ourselves unable to express our true feelings through technology. Whether it's a misunderstood text, an oversimplified emoji or a Skype call that leaves us feeling lonely, when most of our communication is carried out through tech, the result is a virtual world that's lacking our humanity - a society lacking in empathy.

Rana el Kaliouby discovered this when she left Cairo, a newly-married, Muslim woman, to take up her place at Cambridge University to study computer science. Many thousands of miles from home, she began to develop systems to help her better connect with her family. She started to pioneer the new field of Emotional Intelligence (EI). She now runs her company, Affectiva (the industry-leader in this emerging field) that builds EI into our technology and develops systems that understand humans the way we understand one another. This is the fascinating story of her mission to humanise technology and what she learns about humanity along the way.

Rana el Kaliouby, Ph.D. is a pioneer in artificial emotional intelligence (EI), as well as the co-founder and CEO of Affectiva, the acclaimed startup spun off from the MIT Media Lab. She grew up in Cairo, Egypt, studying 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. Her company 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.

Lucid and captivating