Today I’m with Dr. Rana el Kaliouby, Co-founder and CEO at Affectiva, a company that uses computer vision to build systems that are emotionally intelligent. Rana, I’ve been talking to our students about the role vision plays at a basic level in AI systems by helping to recognize objects and behavior but your work is in recognizing and responding to human emotion. What do you think makes this such important work? When we think of human intelligence, we tend to think of cognitive intelligence or IQ, but having emotional intelligence, which is the ability to empathize and read emotions, is central to how we all interact with the world. So the question becomes, how can we build systems that are artificially emotionally intelligent? Right. And this is the challenge we work on at Affectiva. We use computer vision and machine learning to recognize emotions as they manifest on your face. Can you tell what I’m feeling right now? Maybe a combination of surprise, a little bit of horror? Yeah, definitely happy surprise. So Affectiva software can recognize emotion just like you can? Yes, by observing your facial features, so how your eyebrows and your mouth and your cheeks move. And once a computer app, you know, or other application can recognize emotions, it can respond to them in real time. And this creates a lot of opportunity for improving and personalizing how we and machines interact with each other.