Bio

My life’s work is about humanizing technology before it dehumanizes us. I am Egyptian-American scientist, entrepreneur, angel investor, author, and an AI thought leader on a mission to bring emotional intelligence to our digital world. I'm Deputy CEO at Smart Eye and formerly, Co-Founder and CEO of Affectiva, an MIT spin-off and category defining AI company. In June 2021, Affectiva was acquired by Smart Eye, where I am currently focused on scaling the company to a global AI powerhouse. A key priority will be to drive AI innovation with a focus on ethics evangelizing Emotion AI in automotive Interior Sensing, Media Analytics and beyond. I am also an executive fellow at the Harvard Business School where I co-teach about AI and startups. My bestselling memoir, Girl Decoded: A Scientist’s Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology (Penguin Random House, April 2020), follows my personal journey, growing up in the Middle East and moving to the United States to become an entrepreneur, juxtaposed against my work building Emotion AI. I’ve raised $50M+ in capital from top-tier investors and non-dilutive funding to bring Affectiva’s Emotion AI, built on deep learning, computer vision, speech science and massive amounts of real-world data, to 90+ countries and to several industries including the automotive industry and media analytics. I have a track record of translating technology innovations into products that address the needs of massive international markets and spearhead the application of Emotion AI to mental health, autism, conversational interfaces, robotics and education. I am very passionate about the ethical development and deployment of AI, including advocating for standards and thoughtful regulation to ensure data privacy and to mitigate data and algorithmic bias. To help establish best practices, compliance and regulation for AI ethics, I am part of industry organizations like the Partnership on AI and the World Economic Forum. As one of few women leading an AI company, I am an advocate for diversity and inclusion in tech and leadership. To help catalyze change and improve equity industry-wide, I am a member of the Boston Steering Committee for All Raise and a member of the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO). I am also a Venture Partner of the MIT Media Lab E14 Fund, a Board Member of SIMPEDs at Boston Children’s Hospital, and a Board of Trustees member at the American University in Cairo, the leading liberal arts university in the Middle East. And I believe in the power of human connection.