Affectiva Gets Grant for Online Facial Reader

US-based facial recognition technology firm Affectiva has been awarded a grant to develop an online version of its software, which enables computers to recognize human expressions and deduce emotional and cognitive states.

Formed in 2009 from a collaboration with the Media Lab at MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Affectiva develops technology to understand how people feel, in order to improve products and experiences. Its products include the Q Sensor wearable biosensor and Affdex facial expression recognition tool.

The firm has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant of $150,000, which will fund a six month project to move the Affdex to an Internet cloud-based platform.

Affdex commercializes MIT's FaceSense technology, another NSF-funded system, which reads states such as liking and confusion from facial video, using any webcam. This system began as an effort to help people on the autism spectrum who have difficulty reading emotion, and is now being commercialized to help businesses understand their customers.

'The NSF grant is an important step toward helping us open up the science of emotion measurement and make it massively available,' states Affectiva co-founder Dr Rana el Kaliouby, who led the invention of the facial expression technology as a researcher at the University of Cambridge and at the MIT Media Lab.

Separately, Forbes.com is planning to develop a new facial expression reader app with Affectiva and MIT Media Lab, to gather data and insights on how viewers respond to advertising.

Web sites: www.affectiva.com and www.nsf.org .