SBIR Phase II: Cloud-Enabled Analysis Of Facial Affect

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This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will commercialize theworld?s first cloud-based emotion measurement platform. Today, the majority of marketresearch is expensive and slow, relying either on subjective self-reports or costly,obtrusive lab-based technologies. The proposed emotion measurement platform aims todemocratize market research by translating nonverbal facial expressions into intuitiveemotional insights. It also drives down research costs and improves market reachthrough the use of widely available webcams as the means to record faces. Thisplatform enables businesses of any size to capture consumer?s emotional reactions asthey engage with their brands, particularly in the areas of advertising, product designand packaging. For example, brand managers, marketers and agencies can optimize adeffectiveness by evaluating viewers' tacit, moment-by-moment emotional response, inreal-time over the web, and through the platform?s emotion norms database. Thetechnical objectives of this project focus on implementing automated facial analysis as ascalable cloud-based software-as-a-service platform, building the emotion normsdatabase, and deploying the platform with leading market research partners.The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is to disrupt longstandingmethods in market research by objectively measuring people?s emotional experiencesa) unobtrusively b) in real-time, c) at scale, and d) cost-effectively. While thisdifferentiated emotion measurement technology can be leveraged in several targetmarkets, the company?s initial focus is on measuring advertising effectiveness andmedia research to deliver actionable insights to leading media and market researchcompanies. In addition, the proposed cloud-based emotion measurement platform hasthe potential to significantly accelerate research in behavioral sciences by enabling thecrowd sourcing of huge corpuses of naturalistic and spontaneous responses to a widerange of interactions and experiences from online learning to social gaming. It alsoallows entirely new research questions to be asked, and tackled with ecologically validdata, such as whether individuals on the autism spectrum respond differently to content.Thus, in line with the origins of this technology, our product accelerates psychologicaland clinical research on social-emotional intelligence. The long-term vision for thissoftware as a service platform is to ?emotion-enable? the Internet, giving consumers andorganizations the ability to add emotion context to all online interactions.