Egyptian-American scientist Rana El Kaliouby spear its new podcast series, Pioneers of AI, on Wednesday, September 18. Produced by Rield Hoffman’s Masters of Scale, the podcast invites listeners to explore how artificial intelligence (AI) will shape the future.
In this series, Rana explores the impact of AI through conversations with leading experts. She approaches AI from ethical, philosophical, and sociological perspectives, encouraging the development of technologies that are not only innovative, but also responsible and thoughtful.
The podcast aims to democratize AI by making it more accessible and inclusive, highlighting voices from diverse ethnic backgrounds and minority groups, and ensuring that a broad range of perspectives are represented in the conversation around the role of AI in society.
In her first episode, Rana interviews Dr. Joy Buolamwini, a Canadian-American computer scientist and digital activist, and founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, to explore the flaws in facial recognition systems and how to make the technology more inclusive.
During the episode, they discuss the inherent biases in AI through the lens of The case of Robert Williams — a man wrongly arrested in 2020 for allegedly stealing thousands of dollars worth of watches. Detroit police matched blurry surveillance footage from the crime to Williams’ driver’s license photo using a facial recognition service, but Williams was not the thief; he was actually driving home from work at the time of the theft.
The case marks the first documented instance of wrongful detention due to facial recognition technology, a tool increasingly used by police departments and government agencies across the United States.
Who is Rana el Kaliouby?
Rana El Kaliouby is on a mission to humanize technology before it dehumanizes us. As co-founder of AI startup Affectiva, with a PhD in machine learning and computer vision from the University of Cambridge and a postdoc from MIT, she has spent more than two decades as a leading AI innovator, pioneering the field of emotional AI.
Rana is also a co-founder and general partner at Blue Tulip Ventures, where she invests in early-stage startups building ethical AI that is good for people.
In a previous interview “I think it is imperative to include young people in this AI revolution. Not only because AI is shaping every aspect of our lives, including that of young people, but also because the younger generation was born into the world of technology and therefore has creative views on what AI should look like,” she said of Egyptian Streets.
