Alan Cowen, PhD is an applied mathematician and computational emotion scientist who has developed new data-driven methods to study human experience and expression. He is the CEO of Hume AI, a startup that provides next-generation tools to understand expressive behavior in audio, video, text, and images. Prior to founding Hume AI, he was a researcher at Google AI, where he helped establish affective computing research efforts. Cowen’s studies in Nature, PNAS, Science Advances, and Nature Human Behavior are the first to analyze facial and vocal expressions at a sufficient scale and level of precision to draw inferences from their occurrence in everyday life across cultures. His work has given rise to a mathematically-based theory of emotion, semantic space theory, which conceives of emotions as dimensions of a complex, multidimensional space.