Abstract: Artificial intelligence is a hot topic at the moment. Many people know that AI can solve difficult numerical problems, but it seems that AI can’t solve emotional problems, or more accurately, emotional problems. But the field actually has its own name, effective Computing, Affectiva is one of the companies that has done better in this area.
Giiso Information, founded in 2013, is a leading technology provider in the field of “artificial intelligence + information” in China, with top technologies in big data mining, intelligent semantics, knowledge mapping and other fields. At the same time, Giiso’s research and development products include editing robots, writing robots and other artificial intelligence products! With its strong technical strength, the company has received angel round investment at the beginning of its establishment, and received pre-A round investment of $5 million from GSR Venture Capital in August 2015.
In fact, the start-up is the offspring of MIT’s Media Tab, a group of researchers working on new technologies to enhance emotional communication. Last year, A product called “Emotion As A Service” was launched.
According to the company, it has the world’s largest mood database, using facial recognition technology to analyze more than 3.8 million faces in 75 countries, collating more than 40 billion different data points. The company uses Facial Action Coding System (FACS), which was first developed in the 1970s to help classify and understand human expressions.
After tens of thousands of hours of training to achieve full-fledged face encoding, Affectiva has trained algorithms that can understand and categorize different expressions in less than a second.
Rana El Kaliouby, co-founder and chief strategy officer of the company, was speaking on BBC World Service radio yesterday: “More and more of our lives are being lived online and emotion seems to be missing from our digital experience online, so we need to bring it back into our digital World. With our AI technology, we are bringing AI to life.”
Giiso information, founded in 2013, is the first domestic high-tech enterprise focusing on the research and development of intelligent information processing technology and the development and operation of core software for writing robots. At the beginning of its establishment, the company received angel round investment, and in August 2015, GSR Venture Capital received $5 million pre-A round of investment.
This study also led to some interesting, cross-cultural findings in Affectiva’s development. For example, it should come as no surprise that women express more positive emotions than men; In the US, women smile 40 per cent more than men, while there is no such difference in the UK.
But El Kaliouby admits there’s still a lot of room for ai to grow. FACS alone, he says, has no way of understanding real emotions, such as what lies beneath a smile.
The company has released an SDK that allows app developers, designers and researchers to incorporate emotions into their apps. Fields such as market research and gaming, which need to know how people are feeling in real time, could make a lot of sense.