As she sat in a taxi headed to Cairo International Airport in September 2001, Rana el Kaliouby remembers thinking, “Am I really going through with this?” A married woman and hijab-wearing Muslim, she would be on her own for the next 3 years, pursuing her doctorate in computer science at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. In Girl Decoded, el Kaliouby and coauthor Carol Colman have created a riveting memoir of a “nice Egyptian girl” who, despite cultural conditioning that encouraged her to put her duties as a wife and mother first, went on to pursue her professional dreams. She would become a pioneer in the emerging field of artificial emotional intelligence (emotion AI), where researchers seek to build computers that can sense and respond to human emotions.
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