FireUp March 2017 — Meet the Hiring Partners: Affectiva
Yes, it’s the startup that invented Emotion AI and innovated how to read human emotions and has been featured on The New Yorker, fortune and many others.
Following our initiative to present our hiring partners for FireUp March 2017 as we mentioned here. We talked to Affectiva to know more about thier product and company and what kind of tech talents they are looking for
Let’s start at the very begining
Affectiva 2009, Professor Rosalind Picard and Rana el Kaliouby spun Affectiva out of MIT Media Lab in 2009 with the vision of bringing emotional intelligence to the digital world.
But why?
Our interactions with technology are becoming more conversational and relational and we believe that the next frontier of AI is artificial emotional intelligence — what we at Affectiva have begun to call Emotion AI.
So what exactly is your product?
We use computer vision and machine learning to build SDKs and API that can read your emotions from the face (and speech, coming soon!)
We have 3 products:
1. SDKs that run in real-time on device (we support iOS, Android, Linux, Windows, Unity, Javascript)
2. Cloud-based APIs, which we call emotion as a service — video in, emotion analytics out
3. A video content testing product, Affdex.
So who needs Emotion AI?
We have a very broad reach of clients in a variety of industries. In gaming, the Flying Mollusk game study uses Affectiva’s emotion-sensing technology with its psychological thriller game to sense a player’s facial expressions using biofeedback to make the game more surreal and challenging when players feel scared or nervous.
For market research, Affectiva delivers real-time insight into unspoken, spontaneous reactions to advertisements, concepts, and other media content. Using advanced facial analysis, Affectiva scientifically measures emotional responses unobtrusively, cost effectively, and at scale.
We also have quite a few more use cases and clients in the automotive, robotics, healthcare, and app industries.
What about the team?
~50 people, roughly half of which are in development in some capacity (we are a startup with evolving roles)
Finally, a few word of advice for the bootcamp graduates.
Dig deeper into the subjects that will get introduced in the bootcamp. Practice and implement the ideas that you will learn and don’t stop at the course work. Most importantly work hard, and don’t be afraid of trying new things or learning something new. As a software engineer, some of the skills that you should be familiar with is using version control systems like git, you should also be familiar with design patterns. Contributing to open source is a huge positive on your profile. Update your Linkedin account regularly with any projects you have accomplished.
