Company Builds a Face-Scanning Emotion Detector, Seeks Important Uses for It | MIT Technology Review
►http://www.technologyreview.com/news/519656/startup-gets-computers-to-read-faces-seeks-purpose-beyond-ads
Although this was an incremental improvement statistically, it reflected a milestone in the field of affective computing. While people notoriously have a hard time articulating how they feel, now it is clear that machines can not only read some of their feelings but also go a step farther and predict the statistical likelihood of later behavior.
After spending three years convening webcam-based panels around the world, Affectiva has amassed a database of more than one billion facial reactions. The accuracy of the system could pave the way for applications that read the emotions on people’s faces using ordinary home computers and portable devices. “Affectiva is tackling a hugely difficult problem, facial expression analysis in difficult and unconstrained environments, that a large portion of the academic community has been avoiding,” says Tadas Baltrusaitis, a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge, who has written several papers on facial coding.
