Yes, by now we have heard of the gender-aware billboards rolling out in pilot projects and such advanced retail technology as interactive dressing room mirrors and shopping carts equipped with digital scanners that offer personalized discounts. It doesn't stop there, however. Computer scientists, egged on by retailers and other business concerns, are tweaking existing technology with a goal of developing ever more astute and real-time insight into what a person is thinking, feeling - and likely to do. If you are a marketer "likely to buy" is a fine substitute.
Reading Facial Expressions
Forbes tells of new technology developed at MIT that can read facial expressions over a webcam, which has proven difficult for computers to achieve. The researchers embarked on the task to help people with autism read others' emotions more easily; now, Forbes reports, it is becoming commercialized to help businesses read their customers.
The MIT Media Lab Affective Computing Group - an MIT spin-out - is creating cloud-based tools that collect and communicate emotion data. It is also building a what is said to be the world's largest repository of facial expressions. Other developments are more geared directly to businesses' needs.
Omnicom Digital is experimenting with technology that allows billboards to tell if a passerby is paying attention and then send messages accordingly. The technology "actually recognizes faces. If you raise your eyebrow, it can track that," says Jonathan Nelson, CEO (via the Wall Street Journal). "We're exploring the applications, and they are endless."
The Barbarian Group is planning to introduce this summer such a device. The next step, the Journal says, is a billboard that can interpret what images have intrigued the passerby the most and then more of them. Further down the line, marketers envisioning linking the real-time emotion captured by the technology to the person’s demographic background - a possibility that makes privacy advocates shudder.
Whither Watkins
How likely such scenarios are, though, are unclear. Aligning computers and technology so closely with human emotions, thoughts and words is, as Forbes pointed out, a significant computing challenge.
Consider Watkins, IBM’s super computer. Despite its winning streak on Jeopardy against the game show's all time champions, building such a repository of data is painstaking. "Watson doesn't look up answers in a specialized structured database," David Gondek, PhD, a researcher on Watson Algorithms and Strategy told TechNewsWorld, "but instead analyzes vast amounts of unstructured content - text from encyclopedias, newspaper articles, textbooks, literature and more, using natural language processing techniques."
