Humanization of Artificial Intelligence

You will be hearing a lot more in coming years about Affectiva.  They are the pioneers in AI who are on a “mission to humanize technology. Spun out of the MIT Media Lab in 2009 they are backed by some heavy weight investors including WPP, Fenox Venture Capital, Horizon Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers and they are the builders of the world’s largest emotion data repository.

Affectiva states “we believe that technology needs to be able to sense, adapt and respond to people’s non-verbal signals, mental states, emotions and reactions, just the way humans do. We created and defined the category of artificial emotional intelligence—Emotion AI. And, now we are expanding this to Human Perception AI: software that measures all things human, from nuanced emotions and complex cognitive states, to people’s behaviors, activities and the objects they use. We use deep learning, computer vision, speech science and massive amounts of real-world data to build solutions never built before. And, the way our technology is being used, we are making lives better: from improving road safety to supporting mental health research, and much more.”

So here is just an example of how they are making our lives better – in the field of transportation.  Right now we have gadgets galore for our cars to help us with blind spots, backing up, parallel parking and more.  But, imagine you are on a road trip and you get tired and your eyes begin to blink . . . who is there to send you a message to warn that you are too tired to continue driving?  Or you are easily distracted with cell phones . . . who is there to send an alert that you need to pay attention to the road?  Or you get road rage pretty easily . .  who will be there to help you navigate a less stressful route?  Your friendly Affective Automative AI – that’s who.

This first in-cabin sensing AI identifies in real time such things as the driver’s facial and voice states and analyzes it to improve road safety.  This personalized experience is accomplished through cameras and microphones in the car.  Nothing is set to the cloud but rather processed locally.  And it measures not only the moods and reactions of the driver but others in the vehicle as well as they may also be a factor in distracting a driver’s attention through their combative arguments, excited states, restlessness and more.

Affectiva is so dedicated to humanizing AI that as mentioned above they built the world’s largest emotion data repository. To date Affectiva has collected more than 6.5 million face videos in 87 different countries.  This data repository helps the AI to understand and learn the possible states of a person’s facial and voice cues.

If you would like to learn more about what Affectiva is doing or to see the repository go to www.affectiva.com