̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - marketing

'Artificial empathy' could help stores improve recommendations for customers

Anonymous — Fri, 18 Mar 2016 09:30:00 +0000

Imagine trying on a piece of clothing, only to find that when you’ve put it on, a computer is able to read your facial expressions and body language so that it can make recommendations for other items of clothing you might like. If Shasha Lu has anything to do with it, this will become a reality.

Visual data has become a main source of corporate and public (unstructured) big data and the focus of Lu’s work is how to harness the power of these images and videos to mine valuable information by combining image/video analytics with current marketing models. “Ultimately,” she explains, “it’s about gaining better customer insights to solve business problems and improve business practice.”

As a new domain in marketing research, Lu explains that it’s all about combining computer science techniques with existing marketing models to develop managerial tools for business. “It was during my PhD that my interest in artificial empathy – automatically inferring people’s internal states based on the information they emit – really took off,” she says. “My supervisor at the time, Professor Min Ding, was really interested in this area and I didn’t take much convincing to share his enthusiasm because I’d always been so fascinated by artificial intelligence.

“My father worked in business when I was little, so I was influenced by that. Plus, I was a great fan of science fiction, especially the innovative stuff like time machines. ̽��ֱ��idea of getting a machine to come to useful conclusions from someone’s expressions and behaviour was therefore massively exciting to me and we now have the technology and computing power to actually make this possible.”

Moving to Cambridge Judge Business School to further her interest in leveraging image and video data was a huge move, she admits. “I came from Shanghai, which is a very big city, similar to London in that it never sleeps. Cambridge, on the other hand, provides a much quieter, small-town life, but I love it.”

Among Lu’s main interests outside work is fashion, which has made her clothing project – entitled A Video-Based Automated Recommender System for Garments – even more motivating.

“When people, especially females, go out shopping, we tend to try a garment on before making the final purchase. When we do so in front of the mirror, the sales person often observes two key pieces of information. ̽��ֱ��first is whether the customer likes it or not, which is inferred by her emotional response from her facial expression. ̽��ֱ��second is which particular part of the garment she likes or dislikes, which is observed through behavioural response. If she’s touching her collar or scratching the lower hem with an annoying expression on her face, for example, we may infer she doesn’t like that bit of the garment.

“Our project uses a camera mounted on top of the mirror – placed outside the changing space – to capture the evaluation process and analyse facial expressions and behavioural responses. Then we combine it with data showing what other customers’ reactions are to the same garment in order to make recommendations to the current customer in real time. In addition, the store can use other pieces of information, such as height and body shape, to make better recommendations or provide better service.”

Customising movie trailers is another project that Lu is involved in. “This is still ongoing, so we don’t have concrete findings yet, but as it stands all move trailers target the same group of people; if there’s, say, a trailer with an action element that’s watched by someone that doesn’t go in for action films, they may well be put off seeing it, whereas in fact the movie might have plenty of non-action that makes the film attractive to this viewer,” she explains.

“We know that it’s possible to analyse the content of movies to extract all kinds of information – lighting, colour, motion and shot, for instance – all of which relates to people’s preferences, and we are working on using this to customise movie trailers according to people’s preferences, thereby improving the effectiveness of the movie trailer and getting people to watch movies they might otherwise dismiss.”

Even the nature of online dating may be influenced by Lu’s work in the future. “We know that certain information about someone’s face in an online profile picture has an impact on the person looking at them. That could be anything from the distance between the eyebrows and nose or to the distance between the nose and mouth. We propose to analyse people’s preferences in order to provide suggestions of candidates that match the types of faces the person is most likely to go for.”

Currently, says Lu, there’s a relatively small group of academics involved in using image and video data in the business world in this way, albeit on a global basis, with growing interest at Harvard Business School, where work is being done, for instance, on inferring people’s preferences for television commercials. “But it’s a growing area,” she says.

Marketing, points out Lu, can feel theoretical and distant, whereas the work she’s involved in is very accessible. “Not only is this area of work innovative and full of potential, but it’s about the everyday aspects of living, and it’s this combination that makes it a really exciting area to be involved in.”

Originally published on the Cambridge Judge Business School website.

Visual data will revolutionise the way companies talk to their customers, according to researchers at the Cambridge Judge Business School.

Ultimately, it’s about gaining better customer insights to solve business problems and improve business practice.

Shasha Lu

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5th Avenue, 2013

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Are we being sold online?

fpjl2 — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 08:00:06 +0000

One in every nine people on Earth is on Facebook and the average Briton devotes an entire day to the site each month. Personal information, much of it volunteered, has become so prevalent and readily available that for many it constitutes the most powerful marketing tool in human history. ̽��ֱ��question is, how is this information being used, and by whom? And, should we be worried?

Listen to the debate here:

From 3:30pm on Saturday afternoon (27 October) at the Faculty of Law, a panel of experts will explore the questions that surround the dream of global connectivity, and the nightmare of human commodity, as part of this year’s Festival of Ideas.

From social interactions, entertainment, shopping, and gathering information, almost any human activity you can think of is now mediated digitally. As such, these behaviours can easily be recorded and analysed, fuelling the emergence of personalised search engines, recommender systems, and targeted online marketing.

This raises highly sensitive questions about privacy and data ownership. Who should have access to such an extraordinarily powerful reservoir of information, and where it should be stored?

“ ̽��ֱ��widespread availability of extensive records of individual behaviour, and the desire to learn more about customers and citizens presents serious challenges to future society, particularly in relation to trust,” says Michal Kosinski, Director of Operations for the ̽��ֱ��’s Psychometrics Centre and Leader of the e-Psychometrics Unit.

“Trust between consumers and corporations, governments and their citizens, families even can be seriously harmed once people realize how exposed they are in the digital environment. It can all still seem quite innocent, with Facebook ‘likes’ and photos of friends, but new research is starting to show that this seemingly harmless information can be used to make very accurate inferences of highly sensitive traits.”

Kosinski, one of the panellists, spends much of his time cultivating and analysing the increasingly immense tracts of data in order to show the precision with which estimations can be made about personality traits, such as openness, extroversion and stability.

“Never before have we had access to such comprehensive behavioural data about consumers,” says Kosinski. “A marketing revolution is upon us, a completely new dimension is added through the combination of scientifically robust personality tests and other demographic information.”

̽��ֱ��other panellists are William Dutton, Professor of Internet Studies at the ̽��ֱ�� of Oxford’s Internet Institute, Nick Pickles, Director of the civil liberties and privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch, and Mariam Cook, Senior Digital Consultant at PR firm Porter Novelli.

“ ̽��ֱ��web connects us more closely than ever before, giving organisations and brands the capability to understand us, target us, and to fulfil our needs and desires in increasingly sophisticated ways,” says Cook. “This presents many fantastic opportunities for marketers, and potential delights for those formerly known as the audience, but it also means great responsibility lies on our shoulders.”

“This presents a challenge - how to balance the apparently conflicting ideals of privacy and openness in all of our data dealings.”

But for Nick Pickles, the increasingly heard motto ‘if we're not paying to use a service, then we're the product’ is at the very core of this issue: “Our personal data is the oil of the internet age and yet we have grown oblivious to how our every movement is being monitored and analysed for commercial gain.”

“As an entire generation outsources it's privacy to social media companies, I believe strengthening individual privacy will soon become a social necessity and a commercial imperative.”

Panel discussion ‘Are we being sold online?’ starts at 3.30pm on Saturday 27 October at the Faculty of Law. With Michal Kosinski, Cambridge's Psychometrics Centre; Professor William Dutton, Oxford Internet Institute; Nick Pickles, Big Brother Watch; Mariam Cook, Porter Novelli and the Chair, Spencer Kelly, Click presenter.

A panel discussion for the Festival of Ideas examines whether social media giants are profiting from our willingness to share the most intimate details of our lives online, and whether we should be worried by this compromise to our privacy.

Never before have we had access to such comprehensive behavioural data about consumers.

Michal Kosinski

Ed Yourdon from flickr

Thinkin' about the code

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