SBIR Phase II: Cloud-Enabled Analysis Of Facial Affect

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will commercialize the world?s first cloud-based emotion measurement platform. Today, the majority of market research is expensive and slow, relying either on subjective self-reports or costly, obtrusive lab-based technologies. The proposed emotion measurement platform aims to democratize market research by translating nonverbal facial expressions into intuitive emotional insights. It also drives down research costs and improves market reach through the use of widely available webcams as the means to record faces. This platform enables businesses of any size to capture consumer?s emotional reactions as they engage with their brands, particularly in the areas of advertising, product design and packaging. For example, brand managers, marketers and agencies can optimize ad effectiveness by evaluating viewers' tacit, moment-by-moment emotional response, in real-time over the web, and through the platform?s emotion norms database. The technical objectives of this project focus on implementing automated facial analysis as a scalable cloud-based software-as-a-service platform, building the emotion norms database, and deploying the platform with leading market research partners. The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is to disrupt longstanding methods in market research by objectively measuring people?s emotional experiences a) unobtrusively b) in real-time, c) at scale, and d) cost-effectively. While this differentiated emotion measurement technology can be leveraged in several target markets, the company?s initial focus is on measuring advertising effectiveness and media research to deliver actionable insights to leading media and market research companies. In addition, the proposed cloud-based emotion measurement platform has the potential to significantly accelerate research in behavioral sciences by enabling the crowd sourcing of huge corpuses of naturalistic and spontaneous responses to a wide range of interactions and experiences from online learning to social gaming. It also allows entirely new research questions to be asked, and tackled with ecologically valid data, such as whether individuals on the autism spectrum respond differently to content. Thus, in line with the origins of this technology, our product accelerates psychological and clinical research on social-emotional intelligence. The long-term vision for this software as a service platform is to ?emotion-enable? the Internet, giving consumers and organizations the ability to add emotion context to all online interactions.