Girl Decoded
A Scientist's Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
In a captivating memoir, an Egyptian American visionary and scientist provides an intimate view of her personal transformation as she follows her calling—to humanize our technology and how we connect with one another.
LONGLISTED FOR THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD • “A vivid coming-of-age story and a call to each of us to be more mindful and compassionate when we interact online.”—Arianna Huffington
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PARADE
Rana el Kaliouby is a rarity in both the tech world and her native Middle East: a Muslim woman in charge in a field that is still overwhelmingly white and male. Growing up in Egypt and Kuwait, el Kaliouby was raised by a strict father who valued tradition—yet also had high expectations for his daughters—and a mother who was one of the first female computer programmers in the Middle East. Even before el Kaliouby broke ground as a scientist, she broke the rules of what it meant to be an obedient daughter and, later, an obedient wife to pursue her own daring dream.
After earning her PhD at Cambridge, el Kaliouby, now the divorced mother of two, moved to America to pursue her mission to humanize technology before it dehumanizes us. The majority of our communication is conveyed through nonverbal cues: facial expressions, tone of voice, body language. But that communication is lost when we interact with others through our smartphones and devices. The result is an emotion-blind digital universe that impairs the very intelligence and capabilities—including empathy—that distinguish human beings from our machines.
To combat our fundamental loss of emotional intelligence online, she cofounded Affectiva, the pioneer in the new field of Emotion AI, allowing our technology to understand humans the way we understand one another. Girl Decoded chronicles el Kaliouby’s journey from being a “nice Egyptian girl” to becoming a woman, carving her own path as she revolutionizes technology. But decoding herself—learning to express and act on her own emotions—would prove to be the biggest challenge of all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
El Kailouby, cofounder and CEO of the tech firm Affectiva, debuts with an uneven recounting of her personal and professional experiences working in the field of "Emotion AI." El Kailouby's professional message comes through with sincerity, as she enthuses about the possibilities of computer programs that can interpret people's emotional states by collecting data on facial expressions and other nonverbal cues. El Kailouby will win over fellow technophiles as she describes holding a hackathon to encourage programmers from diverse backgrounds to contribute to Affectiva's software, and working on an "emotion prosthetic" to help autistic people understand others' facial expressions. The details of her personal life juggling the expectations traditionally placed on "nice Egyptian girls" while pursuing her technological vision, and watching the post-Tahrir Square period of unrest in her home country while working in the U.K. and U.S. also make for intriguing material, but her discussion of them feels surface-level and self-conscious, as if she's working too hard to come across as a simultaneously aspirational and relatable role model. Readers will find el Kailouby's book an appealing manifesto for Emotion AI, but only a serviceable memoir.
