“Girl Decoded, by Egypt’s Rana el Kaliouby, is not just a book but an invitation to travel through a fascinating story of self-improvement, revolutionary technology and cultural diversity. Dr. el Kaliouby’s work takes us through her life and her journey to humanise technology, becoming an emblem of the global influence that a talented and diverse mind can achieve in the world of digital innovation.
Born in Egypt into a middle-class family that was very concerned about their daughters’ education, Rana el Kaliouby became interested in the study of emotions through facial expressions during her computer science studies at the American University in Cairo. This gave rise to the idea of developing an algorithm that would allow computers to understand people’s emotional state by analysing their micro-expressions. Rana el Kaliouby applied for a doctoral scholarship at the University of Cambridge and was able to develop her idea. After completing her PhD in the UK, Rana el Kaliouby was offered a post-doctoral fellowship by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which allowed her to continue her research in the field of Artificial Emotional Intelligence. As a result of his discoveries, Affectiva was born, a startup that applies his findings to fields such as market research, audiovisual content optimisation and car driving safety.
I haven’t really enjoyed a book this much in a long time. “Girl Decoded” not only tells us how a woman educated in a traditional Islamic society breaks all cultural and social moulds to become the CEO of a technology company, but also makes us reflect on how the United States is being able to capture digital talent in the most remote corners of the planet, and how the American economy is able to develop new products and business models based on disruptive technologies.
One of the keys to the dynamism of the US economy is its ability to attract talent from all over the world. In any human collective, the proportion of truly brilliant and innovative people who are capable of generating new ideas is really low. That is why an economy that aspires to lead the world in innovation must be able to detect and attract digital talent from anywhere. A new digital talent that is, to a large extent, in the new urban middle class of the emerging economies of countries such as Egypt (110 million), India (1.4 billion), Indonesia (274 million) or Mexico (127 million).
To attract them, American and British universities have extensive doctoral and postdoctoral scholarship programmes and are always open to receiving promising students from emerging countries. Spanish universities, on the other hand, hire few foreign professors and offer few grants to researchers from outside their own university. While in Spain less than 3% of university professors are foreign, in the UK 18% of its university professors were born outside their own country. Not only that, but nearly 70% of Spanish university professors obtained their doctorate at the university where they teach. This inbreeding prevents Spanish universities from attracting real talent and hampers their ability to compete in an increasingly global environment. The reality is that Spanish universities are not competing because they are more oriented towards favouring “home-grown” professors and maintaining the status quo set by the professors than accessing external talent. This endogamy is exacerbated in the autonomous communities that have their own language and which make it a requirement for access to a teaching post to be fully proficient. Thus we find that, while the University of Cambridge or MIT recruit from a global pool of talent, Spanish universities are increasingly focused on themselves, each of them recruiting in their own field. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why no Spanish university is among the top 200 in the world.
However, digital talent must not only be captured, but also provided with the means to develop their research, experiment and scale their discoveries. This is the only way to achieve a real university-business transfer. To achieve this, it is essential, first and foremost, that university research is adequately funded. But this is not enough, as it is also necessary for large companies to be present on campus, detecting investment opportunities and injecting money into research projects.
Rana el Kaliouby tells us in his book how they reached the point where they realised that the amount of investment needed to train their algorithm could not come exclusively from university funds, and that is when they took the plunge and set up their own company, Affectiva , which gave them access to corporate investment sources. One of the keys to the development of the algorithm was the agreement reached with Mildward Brown of the WPP group, which incorporated their algorithm into its qualitative customer research methodology, allowing the algorithm to be “trained” on over 13 million faces of various genders, races and ages.
Finally, “Girl Decoded” raises the question of how diversity, both in terms of gender and culture, can enrich and add value to innovation projects. Managing diversity is not only a question of equity, but also a strategy to foster innovation and progress. By bringing different perspectives and approaches to the table, nations can nurture a stronger and more effective innovation culture.
As with the previous two points, the United States has a significant head start on this. Unlike European countries, which are having a serious inability to integrate our immigration, the United States is demonstrating a great capacity to integrate Asian and African immigrants. One of the keys to its success may be that the United States has not built its national identity on a particular culture or religion, but on the principles of tolerance and religious freedom. In the book, which ends by narrating the process of Rana el Kaliouby and her children obtaining American citizenship, we can see the pride with which the author acquires her new nationality without the slightest conflict with maintaining her Egyptian identity and her cultural and religious heritage.In short, Girl Decoded is a deeply personal and energetic tale that weaves together one woman’s life and her role in cutting-edge technology, illuminating crucial issues such as global talent attraction, university-industry collaboration, and the importance of diversity integration and management. This work is not only a delight for technology lovers, but also for any reader curious about how the diverse threads of our lives can weave such an inspiring and transformative narrative.