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Girl Decoded

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Girl Decoded Girl Decoded: Humanizing Technology before it Dehumanizes Us View it on the Northeastern University Alumni YouTube Channel View it on Rev.com with the transcription playback Betsy Ludwig: Welcome to our last MILEs Masterclass of the spring 2020 season. This is our grand finale and I'm Betsy Ludwig, executive director of Women's Entrepreneurship at Northeastern University. And before I introduce our very special guests, I'd like to take a moment to thank everyone who's made this MILEs season a success. For those who don't know, MILEs is an acronym for Masterclasses in Innovation, Leadership, and Entrepreneurship. And when we conceived these masterclass series at the end of March, the world was filled with unprecedented uncertainty, disease, economic meltdown, and no one knew exactly what to do or how to react. Betsy Ludwig: But in the chaos, our team saw some certainty and we saw the certainty of our community, and we immediately understood that we needed to support female founders now more than ever. We saw grit, we saw resilience and a new term I just learned, which is antifragility, the ability to come out of a crisis stronger than you were before it. We knew we had an amazing group of women doing fabulous things in their fields in and around Northeastern, and quickly realized we could leverage the huge Northeastern platform to give these women a voice to inspire the community and further their business goals. Betsy Ludwig: Whatever the scenario, we know that no one's life was the same as it had been beforehand, and that the commonality of that experience has bonded us together. Over the last two months, we posted 10 masterclasses featuring over 20 amazing women in 2020. We covered topics ranging from global FinTech to opportunities in healthcare, to self compassion, to design thinking, how to build a side hustle, how to demystify your financing, your startup, the importance of building a community as a cornerstone to entrepreneurial resilience, and now today, humanizing technology. Betsy Ludwig: I just want to thank everyone for your participation, either as a member of the audience, a speaker, a coordinator, or just a cheerleader. It takes a village and we really have one here. As always, this format is very informal. We encourage active participation from the audience with the chat. And please remember to mute your microphones. As an added bonus today, Rana is giving away some copies of her book to active chat participants. We really encourage you to ask your questions. Betsy Ludwig: Without further ado, I'd like to introduce our speakers today. We have two amazing powerhouse women in the computer science fields. I have to admit I'm completely out of my depth on this topic. We're joined by Rana el Kaliouby, who's a PhD CEO and co-founder of Affectiva, and author of Girl Decoded. She's an academic turned entrepreneur, and she will share her take on being a founder in a white and male dominated field in her quest to humanize technology. Betsy Ludwig: I want to just take a minute to read a review that's in her book. Here it is, almost read it. And it says, "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 conscious and emboldens women all over the globe to fight for their dreams." That's by Dr. Kate Darling and I thought that was just really a really nice review. Betsy Ludwig: She's joined by Northeastern's amazing Dean of the Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Carla Brodley. Prior to joining Northeastern, Dean Brodley was a professor at Tufts University and Purdue University, and her interdisciplinary machine learning research has led to advances not only in computer and information science, but in areas, including remote sensing, neuroscience, digital libraries, astrophysics, content-based image retrieval of medical images, computational biology, chemistry, evidence based medicine and predictive medicine. Betsy Ludwig: Please join me today in welcoming these awesome speakers for a nice chat. And I turned it over to you, Carla. Carla Brodley: Thank you for that. I like to say maybe I have the attention span of a net, which is why I've needed to collaborate with so many different fields, but actually I believe that new machine learning algorithms are invented through the necessity of trying to make things work in a new domain. I have so many questions to ask you, but let's start with just tell us about your company and what it does, and who's using the software, and why you started it. It's really three questions. Rana el Kaliouby: First, I want to just start by thanking Betsy and you, Carla for doing this. I'm very excited. I've gotten to know Northeastern in a number of ways. First, through collaborating with Professor Matthew Goodwin. We go all the way back to when I was at MIT Media Lab, and he got me and I'll talk about some of the work we did in autism. But also, we have a number of co-ops that have interned with us over the last few years and they ended up... I think we have an amazing track record of hiring these people, including a few women too in computer science. I'm just very grateful for this collaboration and this partnership between my company and Northeastern. Rana el Kaliouby: Yeah, so I'm in the field of humanizing technology, and basically at a high level, technology has a lot of cognitive intelligence, a lot of IQ, but very little emotional intelligence. When we think of AI, for example, artificial intelligence, it's all about automation and efficiency, and productivity, but nobody's really thinking about the human centric elements. Can technology help us be more connected, help us be more empathetic? And what would that world look like? Rana el Kaliouby: My background is I'm a computer scientist. I studied computer science as an undergraduate at the American University in Cairo. And from then on, did my PhD at Cambridge University, focused on building and using computer vision and machine learning to build emotionally intelligent technology. And then I had the opportunity to join Professor Rosalind Picard's Lab at MIT Media Lab to apply this emotion recognition technology first to autism. And that's how I collaborated with Matthew Goodwin. And then later, that provided the impetus for starting Affectiva so that we can apply this technology to many industries around the world, including automotive, mental health and other areas. Rana el Kaliouby: It's been quite the journey of taking a core technology that I feel very passionate about and then bringing it to the world through Affectiva. Carla Brodley: How do companies use the products? How do they, if they buy your software, can you give a couple of different use cases? Rana el Kaliouby: Yeah, one of the very first use cases was around quantifying how people respond to content online. We're all consuming all sorts of content and we are now able to quantify through people's facial expressions, moment by moment, what their experience is like. And that product is in 90 countries around the world and it's used by the Fortune 500 companies. More recently, we've been really focused on the automotive industry where our technology's being used to identify distracted drivers and drowsy drivers, and what's happening inside the car. A lot of computer vision and a lot of deep learning, and machine learning. Rana el Kaliouby: And then another area that I'm super passionate about, which I think overlaps with your interests, Carla, as well, is this idea of a sensing platform to advance mental health, are our quantification, objective longitudinal quantification of mental health. We do a lot of work or we partner with companies that are focused on autism and we've done a little bit of work around depression and Parkinson's. Carla Brodley: Oh, I have a question, which I don't know if that's possible. I've been thinking about your software, and it's so interesting and so cool. And we've all moved to an online environment. I'm wondering if there, like let's say you're teaching and you have a whole bunch of little boxes of people. Would there be a way to use your software to tell who's confused and who's bored, and who's multitasking, so you could call on the student who's multitasking or if somebody is confused, you could say, "So and so, do you have a question?" It would just help you as a person, and particularly if you're a faculty member who's not so good at reading facial expressions. Rana el Kaliouby: I think there's a huge use case for this technology now that we're all migrated into this virtual universe. Right? Because as you said, when you're presenting... I've been doing a lot of these book talks, because my book tour had to pivot to a virtual book tour. I give a lot of these talks and often it looks like there's a hundred plus people. I can't see you all, which I ordinarily would have if you and I, Carla, were doing this live together physically, we would riff off of the audience's energy, but we can't do that right now.
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