SBIR-STTR Award

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims to develop Affectiva Face Reader Platform; a cloud-enabled software as a service platform for the analysis of emotional and cognitive states from the face. Affectiva Face Reader Platform addresses potentially lucrative business opportunity in: 1) market research, 2) media research, 3) product testing and 4) usability testing, offering insights into customer resonance. The approach consists of building a multitier architecture that makes facial expression analysis seamless, scalable and affordable. The company envisions a product that offers face-analysis as an affordable software as a service solution using highly scalable cloud-computing resources, enabling use by academics and smaller users, and higher-profit use by heavy users in industry. The goal is a technology service that positively impacts the way customers and businesses communicate about product experiences. The proposed product is potentially transformative in several ways: the company is allowing more accurate understanding of an important aspect of human communication, and they are democratizing market research. In addition, the product if successfully deployed has the potential to accelerate psychological and clinical research on social intelligence

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