SOMETIME NEXT SUMMER, you’ll be able to watch a horror
series that is exactly as scary as you want it to be—no more, no less. You’ll
pull up the show, which relies on software from the artificial intelligence
startup Affectiva, and tap a button to opt in. Then, while you stare at your
iPad, its camera will stare at you.
The software will read your emotional reactions to the show
in real time. Should your mouth turn down a second too long or your eyes
squeeze shut in fright, the plot will speed along. But if they grow large and
hold your interest, the program will draw out the suspense. “Yes, the killing
is going to happen, but whether you want to be kept in the tension depends on
you,” says Julian McCrea, founder of the London-based studio Portal
Entertainment, which has a development deal with a large unidentified
entertainment network to produce the series. He calls Affectiva’s face-reading
software, Affdex, “an incredible piece of technology.”
McCrea is one of the first outside developers to experiment
with Affectiva’s developer tools to make technology capable of interpreting
feelings based on tracking your facial expression. Scientists Roz Picard and
Rana el Kaliouby spun the Waltham, Massachusetts-based tech startup out of MIT
Media Lab in 2009. Picard has since left the company, but El Kaliouby, 36,
remains the chief science officer and is committed to a bigger vision:
“Personally, I’m not going to stop until this tech is embedded in all of our
lives.” Already, CBS has used it to determine how new shows might go down with viewers.
And during the 2012 Presidential election, Kaliouby’s team experimented with
using it to track a sample of voters during a debate.
With $20 million in venture funding, the company has so far
worked closely with a few partners to test its commercial applications. Now it
plans to open its tools to everyone. Starting today, Affectiva will invite
developers to experiment with a 45-day free test and then license its tools.
You remember Intel inside? El Kaliouby envisions “Affectiva-embedded” technology,
saying, “It’ll sit on your phone, in your car, in your fridge. It will sense
your emotions and adapt seamlessly without being in your face.” It will just
notice everything that’s happening on your face. She’ll expand on her strategy
May 19 at the LDV Vision Summit, a coming together of some of the smartest
companies cracking the problem of machine vision, in New York.
Millions of Faces
El Kaliouby has a PhD in computer science from Cambridge
University, completed a post-doc at MIT Media Lab, and built Affectiva’s core
technology as part of her academic work, intending to use it to help children
with autism. “As I was doing that we started getting a lot of interest from
industry,” says el Kaliouby. “The autism research was limited in scope,” she
explained, so she turned to the business world to have a greater impact.
Affdex, the company’s signature software, builds detailed
models of the face, taking into account the crinkle of the skin around the eye
when you smile or the dip in the corner of your bottom lip when you frown.
Since el Kaliouby started working on the Affectiva algorithms, the software has
logged 11 billion of these data points, taken from 2.8 million faces in 75
countries.
With its massive data set, el Kaliouby believes Affectiva
has developed an accurate read on human emotions. The software can, in effect,
decode feelings. Consider Affectiva’s take on tracking empathy: “An example
would be the inner eyebrow rise,” says el Kaliouby. “Like when you see a cute
puppy and you’re, like, awww!” It can even note when you are paying attention.
The software relies on a so-called Facial Action Coding
System, a taxonomy of 46 human facial movements that can be combined in
different arrays to identify and label emotions. When it was developed in the
late 1970s, humans scored emotional states manually by watching the movement of
facial muscles. It was time intensive. “It takes about five minutes to code one
minute of video,” says el Kaliouby. “So we built algorithms that automate it.”
The software had to be trained to recognize variety in expressions. My smirk,
for example, might not look like your smirk. “It’s like training a kid to
recognize what an apple is,” el Kaliouby says.
Smile!
Five years in, the technology has become robust enough to be
reliably useful. Experience designer Steve McLean, for example, who runs the
Wisconsin design firm Wild Blue Technologies, has used Affectiva to build a
video display for Hershey to use in retail stores. If you smile at the screen,
the display dispenses a free chocolate sample. Tech startup OoVoo, which
competes with Skype, has integrated the software into its videochat to create a
product called intelligent video that can read chatters’ emotions. “We’re
looking at focus groups, online education, and political affinity,” says JP
Nauseef, managing director of Myrian Capital, which invested in both Affectiva and
OoVoo and sits on Affectiva’s board.
But for all of Affectiva’s potential, it will take more than
creative developers to help its technology catch on more broadly. “The hidden
discussion that hasn’t been brought up is trust,” says Charlene Li, CEO of the
research outfit Altimeter Group, who has followed Affectiva closely since 2011.
“I love the product, but I’m also terrified by it,” she says. She points out
that should this data fall into the wrong hands, it could be dangerous for
consumers. What happens, for example, if you are often sad while using a piece
of Affectiva-embedded software and the software’s developer chooses to sell
that information to a pharmaceutical company?
It’s a concern that el Kaliouby takes very seriously. “We
actually don’t store any personal information about the consumers, so we do not
have any way of tying back the facial video to an individual,” she says. “We
have 2.78 million face videos in the platform, and if your face was in there,
none of our team would be able to pull it out for you.”
That may be so, but as the company makes its tools available
to a broader set of developers, it will have to monitor how the software is
rolled out to prevent them from abusing it—and to make sure that as users
interact with it for the first time, they’re aware of it and feel they are in
control of the experience.
The technology may be very good at reading your emotions.
But humans will have to take care how to act on them.
Original Source: http://www.wired.com/2015/04/computers-can-now-tell-feel-face/
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