Girl Decoded

I want to start off by saying that his book is a huge source of inspiration to me. being Egyptian, I could relate to, well, a lot of the challenges and obstacles that faced Dr. rana during her youth. One thing I loved in particular was her academic journey, It is amazing to think of how many things could have gone wrong, I mean, she could have had more strict and close-minded parents, she could have ended up with an abusing, unsupportive husband, she could have not found the strength to complete her PHD as an alone mother in Cambridge, she could have never stumbled upon kohen’s database, literally millions of things. Before I begin to criticize the aspects I didn’t like of the book, I want to stress on how much respect I have for the scientist side of Dr. Rana, that side of her should be a role example for all middle eastern women.

Dr. Rana has had a childhood that I wouldn’t say I relate to at all. She says she is an upper middle-class but she attended international schools and the AUC, had a personal driver, a full time nanny tending to her and her sisters’ needs, a cook, and she even later said that her family had an investigator? She was clearly a high-class, which - on some level- meant she already had a huge headstart in life. Nonetheless, she was still more academically-driven than most and according to her, she studied harder than most. Her parents never saved money on the expense of her education and from what I read, they seemed sincere about wanting what’s best for their daughter, but the way I see it, they actually failed her on what really counts: relegion. As you flip through the pages, you grow more and more certain that something is a little off, like for example criticizing “eastern culture” in some situations when in fact it is actually basic relegion teachings. The first few chapters, which talked about her childhood, she never mentioned anything about getting a proper relegious education but her criticism was embarrassing to the extent that I wanted to reach out and tell her the truth. “Women shouldn’t travel alone without a mehrem”, “Women should obey their husbands and prioritize the stability of their homes”, “tending to your father’s needs even before he asks is berr”, these are not backward eastern culture, this is basic relegion. This is probably the one thing she kept bringing up over the course of the book and I failed to understand every time whether she was trying to rebel against islamic teachings or if she was merely ignorant.

Another take from the book is how relatively straightforward things have been in tech a few years back. Maybe I’m too much of a beginner to tell, but Dr. Rana had a fairly straightforward mission, she wanted to make computers more empathetic so she gathered the data, trained a model, and voila she had a computer that recognized emotions. Of course, I completely understand that it wasn’t that easy but what I mean is, the general lines were clear. I feel like nowadays it’s harder to keep up with the field; to understand all the major breakthroughs in machine learning, and the many subfields emerging by the day (like reinforcement learning, self-supervised learning etc..), and the much more new logics implemented in activation functions, loss calculation, data scaling, encoding methods. It’s tricky to put the right pieces together for a task that no one has attempted to do before. It, on some level, is harder than it was back then because of the diverse options. However, again, considering how the learning materials was scarce, how hard it was to acquire huge datasets, and of course the personal setbacks that Dr-Rana talked about in the book, it probably checks out.

The last few chapters were especially inspiring because when she mentions all the partnerships she has done as a founder of Affectiva and how her software was used for such a lot of fruitful purposes, it opened my eyes to how technology could be of help to ultimately every single field of science and non-science subjects in one way or another. You know how sometimes your parents nag you -if you’re a computer scince major- about not choosing to major in a medical field so you can help people, from what I read in that book and my humble personal experience, I can confidently and evidently say that technology is much more empowering for helping people than any other field, and Dr. Rana has refueled my long ambition of doing so in those chapters and she we’ll probably work up yours too if you read the book.

While I don’t really agree that scientists and researchers should politics blind, but I did like how Dr. Rana never engaged in politics or at least she didn’t mention any of such encounters in the book. I am just mentioning this since most of the autobiographies I read usually had her authors political opinions which -unless he/she is a political figure- is something I’m simply not interested in.

At the end, I believe Dr. Rana has set an example of why we were ordered by god to not live in non-muslim countries (for non-educational or non-medical purposes). We see how she has become “Americanised” - a term that she has somehow taken as a compliment- in various aspects. For example, being tolerant with LGBTQ people and befriending them, engaging in the the dating culture and even letting her kids make her tinder profile, and partnering with Israeli corporates. The thing is she wrote these things as if they were ordinary actions, which is even worse than the actions themselves. I’d be lying though If I didn’t respect some aspects of the way she raised her children, like for example taking them out separately and helping them set their priorities and goals in life, which is something I’ve decided to do too if by god’s will I had kids of my own.

I loved how expressive she was of her feelings during every event she encountered and wrote in the book. At times I would feel nervous, happy, proud for her, sometimes all at once.

To sum up, I loved the science part of the book so much especially that I myself am trying to get into machine learning so it felt like I’m seeing what a perfect academic path for me would be. I loved so many aspect of Dr. Rana’s personality, however, I believe she has to acknowledge the mistakes she has done in life and seek forgiveness from god for them, and I really hope that for her, because she is such a great person. I know that for sure because I was once a student intern at Affectiva and I listened to her talk and I admired her even before I knew anything about her back in 2020. For all of that, I rate the book a 7/10.