The Latest News, Views, and Insights from Kairos

We take a look at the preconception about face recognition technology and how it is portrayed in popular culture. Like many things, there's more than meets the eye.

1984, George Orwell said it best “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU”, a line that seems to be repeated in different ways in different mediums over the course of human history. Big brother is usually a reference to the government, but it’s any authoritative power, who uses force, power, and technology to mindlessly control the majority of the population.

Movies and conspiracy theorists will tell you that big brother used to watch us and control us through large, gimmick, marketing posters, later through government spies who attended public functions with normal folks, and for the past few years big brother has been watching us through our cell phones, televisions, and emails. The new trending way for our big brother to watch us today is through facial recognition, facial mapping, and emotional analytics.

Imagine you are watching a political debate where Candidate A is passionately going on about a topic and Candidate B is listening attentively. The camera zooms in on Candidate A whose eyes are wide open and hands are gesticulating. As the camera pans to candidate B you see it, a smirk, and a quick eyebrow raise. It only takes a fraction of a section but through this small group of facial movements you have learned that Candidate B does not agree with Candidate A. Candidate B didn’t have to say a word, the distaste was shown through a micro expression, which will gain or lose voters’ sway just like that.

Whatever your opinion about facial recognition software, it’s clear it’s becoming an integral part of everyday life. Whether it’s preventing and eliminating crime, identifying lost children, ensuring deliveries, or just bringing some much needed humanity to the tech revolution. Afterall, in the not too distant future, every ‘thing’, we are told, will be connected to the Internet. It’s only a matter of time before those ‘things’ are able to recognize and understand us.

Now to some this may feel like an Orwellian prophecy come true, yet, on closer inspection, this simply isn’t the case. Companies, both big and small, are thinking deeply about how to make our lives easier with this technology.

“How are you?” What a simple question with so many complex answers yet most of us answer with “Good”. Besides our culture, why do we default to a one-word expression to explain our feelings? We feel a range of emotions but to use them we must learn what they are and express them correctly.

We’ve already discussed the 6 universal emotions; joy, surprise, sadness, anger, disgust, fear, and sometimes contempt, but there are many other emotions that stem off of them.

As an IBM Watson Ecosystem Partner we work with IBM Watson™ to transform how businesses understand people through unique human analytics. Kairos’ face analysis algorithms are able to recognize and understand how people feel in video, photos and the real-world. Watson is a cognitive computing platform that uses machine learning to reveal insights from large amounts of unstructured data.