Affectiva Wins Second NSF Award to Help Computers Recognize Facial Expressions
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Waltham, MA – June 5, 2012. Affectiva announced today that it has won a second National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, this time for $500,000, to further develop the world’s first cloud-based emotion measurement platform using facial expression recognition.
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Affectiva is an MIT spin-off developing emotion measurement technology including Affdex, which reads emotional states such as smiling, confusion and attention from facial expressions using a webcam. Today, Affdex addresses an enormously costly business problem: quantifying the emotional connection people have to brands. Affectiva’s vision is to expand the technology to enable many applications, including helping people with autism spectrum disorders and others who have difficulty reading faces in real-time conversation.
Affectiva previously won its NSF Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants of $180,000 to move Affdex to a cloud platform. Since then, Affectiva has completed public campaigns that crowdsource people’s responses to ads on Forbes.com and in conjunction with the 2011 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity and the 2012 Super Bowl. Affectiva also formed a partnership with Millward Brown, one of the world’s leading research agencies, which collaborated on the Super Bowl campaign.
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This second NSF grant for $500,000 will enable Affectiva to further develop Affdex to empower brand managers to optimize ad performance by testing viewers’ tacit, emotional response to media, in real-time over the web. In addition, content providers will be able to assess the emotional impact of content prior to releasing a campaign using Affectiva’s emotional norms database, which will help answer questions such as how does an ad’s emotional engagement compare to other ads or how do people in different countries respond to humor in a campaign.
“The SBIR programs are highly competitive. So this is both a great honor as well as a big responsibility!” said Affectiva co-founder Dr. Rana el Kaliouby, who is principal investigator on the grant and who led the invention of the facial expression technology as a researcher at the University of Cambridge and the MIT Media Lab.
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The ad-testing campaigns and partnership help Affectiva build the world’s largest repository of facial expression video and to advance the core facial analysis science significantly. As computers get more examples of facial expressions, they get better at recognizing them, and Affectiva’s vision is to improve recognition to enable many new applications. The goal is a technology service that truly transforms the way individuals and businesses communicate about emotional experiences.
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About The National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering. In fiscal year (FY) 2012, its budget is $7.0 billion. NSF funds reach all 50 states through grants to nearly 2,000 colleges, universities and other institutions. Each year, NSF receives over 50,000 competitive requests for funding, and makes about 11,000 new funding awards. NSF also awards nearly $420 million in professional and service contracts yearly. For more information, visit www.nsf.gov
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About Affectiva
Founded in 2009 by members of the MIT Media Lab, Affectiva the leader in emotion measurement technologies used to understand how people feel in order to improve products and experiences. Affectiva’s customers include Fortune 500 companies, agencies and leading universities. Its products include the Q™, a wearable biosensor, and Affdex facial expression recognition technology. Affectiva is privately held with backing from the National Science Foundation and funding from WPP, Myrian Capital and the Peder Sager Wallenberg Charitable Trust, represented by Lingfield AB. For more information, visit www.affectiva.com.
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