Rana El Kaliouby is the Chief Science Officer of Affectiva—and the woman paving the path to bring emotional intelligence to modern technology.

Affectiva’s software enables technology to interpret emotion through facial expressions and is currently being used by thousands of developers to create new programs in countless industries—from healthcare to market research.

Rana’s Formative moment stems from her decision to leave her home in Egypt to attend school first in Cambridge and then Boston, where she was invited to join the MIT Media Lab to work on a Google Glass project for individuals with autism. It was there did she realize the software she was developing had a bottomless potential applications, from healthcare tools that know what a patient is feeling to market research tools that can track reactions.

el Kaliouby is the second subject of Formative, a collaborative video series between Google Cloud Platform and Reddit’s Entrepreneur community. The series revolves around eight entrepreneurs and delves into one pivotal defining moment in their respective career paths that was crucial to their success.

New Formative episodes launch each Tuesday, featuring a new entrepreneur nominated directly by the Reddit community. Watch our premiere episode with Casey Neistat here.