3 Arab American Tech Trailblazers
Happy Arab American Heritage Month!
Though their work is often overlooked, Arab American inventors have made major contributions to American technology. So this month, for Arab American Heritage Month, we’re saying it loud and clear: throughout history, America’s progress in science and tech has been MASSIVELY boosted by the innovations of Arab-American makers and visionaries! Here are just three of our favorite Arab-American tech trailblazers.
Rana el Kaliouby
Founder of Affectiva & Emotional Recognition Tech Pioneer
Rana el Kaliouby is an Egyptian-American computer scientist, AI thought leader, angel investor, and entrepreneur working to humanize technology. While she was completing her doctoral research at the University of Cambridge, she struggled to connect with her loved ones in video calls back home. So, after earning her doctorate, el Kaliouby joined the Affective Computing group at MIT, where she helped develop an “emotional hearing aid” and a pair of glasses that could read emotions and social cues. These tools comprised the Emotional-Social Intelligence Prosthesis, wearable tech for people with autism who have trouble identifying other people’s emotions. In 2009, el Kaliouby co-founded Affectiva, a company that develops pioneering emotional recognition technology. She is also an executive fellow at the Harvard Business School and author of Girl Decoded: A Scientist’s Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology.
Tony Fadell
Father of the iPod
When Apple was on the verge of collapse in 2001, they called Arab American inventor Tony Fadell. Apple CEO Steve Jobs had imagined a product that could save his company — a personal music player that could put 1000 songs in your pocket. But there was no design, no team, no prototype, and no real traction for the idea. Undeterred, Fadell assembled a team and got to work. The result was the iPod, which launched in November 2001 and revolutionized the entire industry. Fadell oversaw the first 18 iterations of the iPod before Jobs gave him his next assignment: to create a new version of the iPod that also had the capabilities of a mobile phone. You guessed it — the result was the first iPhone, the invention of which was spearheaded by Fadell. After leaving Apple, Fadell has continued inventing and building game-changing personal tech, like the Nest thermostat.
Taher Elgamal
The Architect of Internet Security
The topic of online privacy and security is dominating the airwaves now, but that wasn’t always the case. However, thanks to early tech visionaries like Egyptian-American Taher Elgamal, developments in internet security and cryptography are rapidly advancing. Elgamal began his pioneering work in the 1980s, before truly anyone else was considering security algorithms. His paper “A Public Key Cryptosystem and a Signature Scheme based on Discrete Logarithms,” published in 1984, formed the bases of the Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) and the Advanced Encryption Standard. Additionally, Elgamal was the driving force behind the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), a protocol that keeps online communications (like email!) secure.