Panel Discussion on the Ethics of Affective Computing

Rana el Kaliouby, Ph.D., a pioneer in Emotion AI, is Deputy CEO at Smart Eye and formerly, Co-Founder and CEO of Affectiva, an MIT spin-off and category defining AI company. Rana realized a successful exit for Affectiva in June 2021 when the company was acquired by Smart Eye, where she will team with Martin Krantz, Smart Eye’s CEO to scale the company to a global AI powerhouse. Rana is the bestselling author of the newly released book Girl Decoded: A Scientist’s Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology. A passionate advocate for humanizing technology, ethics in AI and diversity, Rana has been recognized on Fortune’s 40 Under 40 list and as one of Forbes’ Top 50 Women in Tech. Rana is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and a Young Presidents’ Organization member. She is also an Executive Fellow at the Harvard Business School and co-hosted a PBS NOVA series on AI. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and a Post Doctorate from MIT.

Jonathan Gratch is a Research Full Professor of Computer Science. Psychology and Media Arts and Practice at the University of Southern California (USC) and Director for Virtual Human Research at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in 1995.  Dr. Gratch’s research focuses on computational models of human cognitive and social processes, especially emotion, and explores these models’ role advancing psychological theory and in shaping human-machine interaction. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief (retired) of IEEE’sTransactions on Affective Computing, founding Associate Editor of Affective Science, Associate Editor of Emotion Review and the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, and former President of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing. He is a Fellow of AAAI and the Cognitive Science Society, and a SIGART Autonomous Agents Award recipient.

Dr. Rosalind Picard, Sc.D., FIEEE, is a professor, inventor, engineer, and scientist.  She wrote the book Affective Computing, and is a highly-cited author with ~350 peer-reviewed scholarly articles, most in digital health, machine learning, wearables, and affective computing.  She co-founded two companies that commercialized inventions by her and her MIT team:  Empatica, providing the first AI-smartwatch validated by the FDA for monitoring seizures, and Affectiva (now part of Smart Eye), providing Emotion-AI software and services.  At MIT, she is a full professor teaching and directing research at the Media Lab, and serves as founding faculty chair for MindHandHeart, MIT’s campus-wide wellbeing initiative.  She is a fellow of the AAAC and the IEEE, a member of the SIGCHI Academy, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Luke Stark is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. His work interrogating the historical, social, and ethical impacts of computing and AI technologies has appeared in journals including The Information Society, Social Studies of Science, and New Media & Society, and in popular venues like Slate, The Globe and Mail, and The Boston Globe. Luke was previously a Postdoctoral Researcher in AI ethics at Microsoft Research, and a Postdoctoral Fellow in Sociology at Dartmouth College; he holds a PhD from the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.