While I was in Beijing for Strata + Hadoop World, several people reminded me of the chatbot Xiaoice—one of the most popular accounts on the Chinese social media site Weibo. Developed by Microsoft researchers, Xiaoice comes with a personality and is able to engage users in extended conversations on Weibo. These types of capabilities highlight that in an attention economy, systems that are able to forge an emotional connection will garner more loyalty and engagement from users.

In this episode of the O’Reilly Data Show, I sat down with Rana el Kaliouby, co-founder and CEO of Affectiva, one of the leading experts in emotion sensing systems. We talked about the impact of deep learning and computer vision, Affectiva’s large facial expression database, and privacy and ethics in an era of multimodal systems.