The European Commission has awarded a €3.64m grant to the Imperial College London and Realeyes to help boost the technology that measures people’s emotions through standard webcams.
The grant for the project ‘SEWA: Automatic Sentiment Analysis in the Wild’, will enable Realeyes to enhance the ability of standard computer webcams to assess whether a person likes or dislikes what they are seeing.
Realeyes’ existing facial coding technology is capable of measuring seven basic emotions, such as happiness, surprise, scare, etc.
The technology is currently used by brands, media companies and agencies to measure their video advertising to make decisions across three key stages, including testing the creative, planning media spend, and analysing the performance.
SEWA is based on the world’s largest database of how ‘likeability’ is linked to emotional reactions.
The company has recorded emotional responses of over 60,000 people along with finding answers to a series of ‘likeability’ questions from sharing content to recommendations.
The grant is expected to help the company develop automated technology based on the link between likeability and emotions.
The SEWA project will be led by Imperial College Professor Maja Pantic, who will receive guidance from experts from different organisations including AOL, Ipsos, Skype, and Kaplan.
Prof. Pantic said: "It’s fantastic that a company at the cutting edge of technology, such as Realeyes, has such close ties to academia.
"It means academic breakthroughs can find real-life applications through commercial partnerships very quickly."
Realeyes CEO Mihkel Jäätma added: "It’s very exciting to be part of this powerful consortium aiming to master new indicators of behaviour that were previously too subtle, even to the human eye."
