Rana El Kaliouby

The first half of the book is mildly interesting, Arab girl coming up falls far from my demographic so there is some interesting bits here and there. However, my main takeaway is that of all her recollections from her 3 first decades of life there is not one joke, or light moment, it seems her life has been a non-stop drama (This is us, or any other soap opera style). Apart from no light moments, it doesn't help that she never admits to doing anything wrong in her life ... so the book feels so stale, artificial, non-human ...

The second half of the book is basically "as a CEO", "I am de CEO", CEO this, CEO that ... I understand that she is proud of her achievements, but it doesn't make for interesting reading. It doesn't help that explanations about very basic ideas (i.e. upholding ethics in AI) go on for pages and pages without gaining any depth.

Anyway, I read the whole thing, so it might not be 100% terrible.… (more)

This was a wonderful book -- Rana writes, with Carol Colman's help, as if she is talking with you, telling you things you would love to have asked her in the first place! I cannot explain, easily, what her company does but it's impressive because it's her idea that was developed with the heart and soul of this one woman from a culture that she is eager to explain, with all of the problems she had to overcome in order to reach the point where she is. In terms of what her business is, I would be fascinated to read an epilogue about the effect that the pandemic, and masks in particular, have had on the entire idea of reading faces (a VERY simplistic description of her company!!!). Her explanations of how important faces are in human interactions really made me look at the pandemic with some extra fear I hadn't quite realized. We often can't recognize the person behind the mask---although the eyes are apparently particularly expressive in the Muslim culture where woman are wearing hijabs that sometimes cover everything BUT their eyes. We are all missing human contact to an enormous degree already but I wish Rana could explain how her company is working through this time. Really a fascinating book, well worth reading. She explains things so well, easily understood by a non-scientist---ME, for example!… (more)