FaceSense: Mind-reading from MIT

70’s-style mind-reading for the digital age, or why we all say one thing and mean another.

We have a longstanding fascination with the human face and the wealth of data that it holds. Now, the Affective Computing Group at the MIT Media Lab (another Brain Pickings darling) has developed FaceSense — a software application that detects head and face gestures in real time, analyzes them and deduces information about the person’s emotional disposition and mental state.

The principle, of course, is nothing new — back in the late 70’s, legendary psychologist Paul Ekman pioneered FACS, the Facial Actions Coding System, which is used to this day by anyone from academic researchers to the CIA to draw information about cognitive-affective states based on the micromuscle contractions of the human face. Though the MIT project doesn’t explicitly disclose it, we bet the data encoding is based, at least to some degree, on FACS.

But what makes FaceSense different and important is that it enables the extraction of such cognitive-affective information from pre-recorded video. And in the midst of all the neuromarketing hype — which is, for the most part, just that: hype — it offers an interesting model for collecting consumer psychology insight remotely, a scalable and useful tool for the age of telecommuting and sentiment analysis. What’s more, it helps bypass the quintessential unreliability of self-report in product testing.

Its applications can, of course, extend far beyond the marketing industry. An accurate disposition detection model for video can be used in anything from analyzing politicians’ televised appearances to testing news anchors for bias. And, judging by the abundance of all things video at CES this year, FaceSense has firmly planted its feet in a rich and ever-expanding space.

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As Seen On Earth: The Infinite Photograph

A portrait of Earth painted with 300,000 brushes, or why editorial curation and user-generated content can be friends.

There’s no question National Geographic is a photographic force to be reckoned with. And now they’re on a mission to inspire people to care about the planet through a gigantic collaborative photo-mosaic of the Earth.

Infinite Photograph is a global project building a portrait of Earth seen through the eyes of ordinary people, a promotional effort for NG’s MyShot initiative. Think of it as crowdsourcing meets collage meets environmental sensibility.

Currently, the mosaic is composed of over 300,000 photos of the natural world, pulled from archived images by MyShot users. But the project is also an ongoing invitation for new submissions — the more images are indexed, the richer the the color sampling will be and the closer to infinity the mosaic can get.

The team at National Geographic envisions various future extensions of the project as the image catalog grows, breaking it down into mosaic representations of sub-categories like water, trees, and animals.

Besides being the socially-smartest marketing effort we’ve seen in a while, we have to respect NG’s fierce editorial curation — even user-submitted images have to live up to the same editorial standards as those in the actual publication in order to make it to MyShot, which ensures all the photographs that do make the cut for Infinite Photograph are absolutely stunning.

But be not discouraged — go ahead and submit some of your own nature-loving shots. It’s not every day you get a chance to feel closer to the planet and to your global cohabitants at the same time.

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A Little Awkward

How to socialize the hipster way and get a discount at Starbucks along the way.

iPod earbuds on, passing people by without eye contact, drifting through the metropolitan maze in your own little bubble. Sound familiar? It’s the Large City Syndrome, and we’ve all got it to some extent. So how do you de-strangerize and rekindle that “social being” side of your existence?

A little awkward is a quirky, inspired, distinctly hipster project that aims to encourage interaction between strangers in the city, coordinating low-key meetings between those who want to meet new people in urban environments.

The project is the work of two students at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Alex Abreu and Stella Kim, for the annual students’ ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program) show.

The way it works is brilliantly simple: To create a meet-up event, you specify the expiration time — could be 30 minutes, could be 3 days — and give a quick clothing description. Then, the system matches you up with someone else in your area who’s looking for an encounter at that time and each of you gets a text message with the nearby location of the meet-up (which the system picks out for you), the time you have to get there, and the other person’s clothing description so you can spot them right away.

Besides the undeniable cool factor and good times potential of the project, the founders are also contemplating some interesting marketing partnerships — namely, hooking up with specific venues in an area to sponsor the project. In return, A little awkward would push people to those venues for meet-ups, offering users perks like coupons or other exclusive discounts at the local partner hangouts.

50% off a Starbucks Chai Latte in good company doesn’t sound like a bad plan for a Sunday afternoon.

We just dig the idea of jolting people out of their urban routine and allowing them to surrender to chance and uncomplicated fun and all those things that somehow gave way the grown-up reality of work and rent and mandatory Friday night dinner parties.

via 3-Minute AdAge