Read My Face
New software reads emotions from facial expressions to determine a
commercial is working! I have been
following this facial expression recognition software creation in the
neuroscience research for years wondering when we would start using it for
deception detection and security and now it is being used to test advertising.
Yes the future is here and it can read your face.
Here is an article on the research.
Subjects
watch a video on a computer screen while the pinhole camera in the computer
watches them back. Volunteers always know when they’re being
recorded, which doesn’t materially affect the results. Engagement, boredom,
amusement, displeasure and more are tracked and analyzed, with changing degrees
of each displayed with real-time fever charts. (The venture-backed company is
not yet profitable.)
+++ The
New Tool for Marketers: Your Face
Jeffrey Kluger @jeffreykluger
March 19, 2015
Businesses are using facial analysis to see if their campaigns are
working on you
If you’re trying to tell a lie or keep a secret, your face is not
your friend. The human face may have been built for certain basic
functions–eating, breathing, seeing–but the 43 separate muscles that keep it
constantly moving mean it is constantly communicating too. Every eyebrow lift,
forehead furrow, mouth twitch means something. That’s bad news if you’re
bluffing, but it’s good for a growing small-business sector that uses facial
analysis to figure out if an ad campaign or a TV pilot is landing with
consumers.
Affectiva, a 30-person operation in Waltham, Mass., is the most
visible of these companies. The six-year-old firm has amassed 1,400 clients,
including Unilever, Kellogg’s and CBS. In the age of precise online and mobile
metrics, most marketing chiefs are tiring of squishy focus-group and
consumer-poll results; they want hard data. Rana el Kaliouby, Affectiva’s chief
science officer and co-founder, wants to provide it to them.
A decade ago, el Kaliouby, who has a computer-science Ph.D. from
Cambridge University with postdoctoral studies at MIT, began collecting video
samples of faces with the goal of helping autistic children. “Autistic kids
have a hard time reading faces,” she says, “so the plan was to design a system
that tells them that the person they’re talking to is smiling, say, or looks
confused, so maybe they want to explain themselves.”
In 2006, a grant from the National Science Foundation brought her
to the MIT Media Lab to continue her work. Industry groups regularly visit the
lab in the hope of discovering new technology, and el Kaliouby’s research
intrigued them. “They asked, ‘Have you thought of applying it to Procter &
Gamble or Fox testing a product or TV lineup?'” she recalls. In 2009 she and
Rosalind Picard, her MIT professor, spun out Affectiva to do just that.
For a starting fee of
$2,500–which climbs depending on whether a 30-second commercial or a one-hour
pilot is being tested–Affectiva makes its software available to marketers. Subjects watch a video on a computer
screen while the pinhole camera in the computer watches them back. Volunteers
always know when they’re being recorded, which doesn’t materially affect the
results. Engagement, boredom, amusement, displeasure and more are tracked and
analyzed, with changing degrees of each displayed with real-time fever charts.
(The venture-backed company is not yet profitable.)
The database Affectiva uses to conduct those analyses is made up
of more than 2.5 million facial video samples, each of which runs for 45
seconds at a rate of 14 frames per second. “We have 7 billion emotional data
points [to use for comparison],” says el Kaliouby. The software corrects for
variables including gender, culture and age, all of which can be important.
“Women tend to smile more than men,” El Kaliouby says, “and they smile longer
too. Older people tend to be more expressive than younger people.” Europeans and
Americans give away more than Asians do, she adds.
This method of data collection has proved popular. Startup nViso,
in Switzerland, employs similar technology as Affectiva. And Emotient, based in
San Diego, collects its data “in the wild,” as CEO Ken Denman puts it, by using
software to study groups of people–shoppers in malls or crowds in arenas–to see
how they’re reacting to what they’re seeing.
Market testing is only the lowest-hanging fruit. El Kaliouby
envisions diversifying into political polling and analysis, as well as helping
teachers of online courses assess student engagement. Autism and other
cognitive and psychological conditions remain on her radar.
There are some potential growth areas that are more controversial:
law enforcement, lie detection and airport security, for example. For both
Emotient and Affectiva they’re no-go zones. “When we first started,” says el
Kaliouby, “we articulated our values for the company and determined that subjects
would always have to opt in, so for that reason we don’t want to be in
security.” That, of course, leaves that space open to new competitors.
This appears in the March 30, 2015 issue of TIME.
