A New Society, a new education!

Ever since Darwin, scientists have systematically analyzed facial expressions, finding that many of them are universal. Humans are remarkably consistent in the way their noses wrinkle, say, or their eyebrows move as they experience certain emotions. People can be trained to note tiny changes in facial muscles, learning to distinguish common expressions by studying photographs and video. Now computers can be programmed to make those distinctions, too.

Companies in this field include Affectiva, based in Waltham, Mass., and Emotient, based in San Diego. Affectiva used webcams over two and a half years to accumulate and classify about 1.5 billion emotional reactions from people who gave permission to be recorded as they watched streaming video, said Rana el-Kaliouby, the company’s co-founder and chief science officer. These recordings served as a database to create the company’s face-reading software, which it will offer to mobile software developers starting in mid-January.

This is an emerging field and complements some of the post GFC analytics . e.g. people who take less than 3 weeks leave in 1 stint are more likely to have breached policies...add to that facial and voice recognition. A UK university was looking at IR camera's in immigration based upon the hypothesis that 'untruth' caused greater brain activity that could be picked up on an IR camera as a trigger for deeper enquiry. Sentiment++

Information from faces ans how to turn information into knowledge

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Weighing In On Retargeting
My friend Frank Pollock asked me to weigh in on this excellent post from Sloan. Here is my take on The New Ad Retargeting:

The Future Of Ad Retargeting
Great post by +Frank Pollock. Here is my answer to his question:

Retargeting works, but I like where this post is going too. I've felt for some time that simple static retargeting is dead. Static retargeting is displaying a batch and blast ad group and this article rightfully picks that idea apart.

I see a new kind of retargeting that combines sophisticated ad serving of thehttp://www.adzerk.com/ variety combined with predictive analytics, personas and segments. 

It is not enough to know I didn't respond to that last ad display. It is more important to know that I didn't respond and so that puts me into a new track, a track created by others within the same archetype or persona group (or tribe) who've acted in the same way. 

Can you rogue out of all tracks? Sure but those are exceptions that prove the value of well thought out branching paths and algorithms. When you are on track A and don't click you fall through to track A-1 and so on. The view / click feedback loop is so important and something quants such as +Melinda Thielbar should be able to help us tighten. 

Anytime "sophisticated" and "branching algorithms" are in the same sentence it means your creative investment must quadruple, but that will be true for Web 3.0 anyway since we will create NO static boxes and only dynamic threads to be fed based on sophisticated branching algorithms. 

Would I use simple static ad retargeting now? Probably NOT. Would I combine retargeting with ad serving, personas and sophisticated branching what if algorithms? In a heart beat :).M