Moneyball Medicine

Computers can interpret the text we type, and they’re getting better at understanding the words we speak. But they’re only starting to understanding the emotions we feel—whether that means anger, amusement, boredom, distraction, or anything else. This week Harry talks with Rana El Kaliouby, the CEO of a Boston-based company called Affectiva that’s working to close that gap.El Kaliouby and her former MIT colleague Rosalind Picard are the inventors of the field of emotion AI, also called affective computing. The main product at Affectiva, which Picard and El Kaliouby co-founded in 2009, is a media analytics system that uses computer vision and machine learning to help market researchers understand what kinds of emotions people feel when they view ads or entertainment content. But the company is also active in other areas such as safety technology for automobiles that can monitor a driver’s behavior and alert them if they seem distracted or drowsy. Ultimately, Kaliouby predicts, emotion AI will become an everyda