In your face! Analyzing facial expressions in R using free APIs

Human emotions have become essential metrics for marketing research, as they provide uncontrolled and mostly unconscious feedback to products and ads. For a long time, automatic classification of facial expressions required lots of training data and research expertise, that made this kind of information difficult to obtain. Recently, tech giants like Microsoft and Google released free APIs that return information on emotional data based on facial expressions. In the presentation, I am going to demonstrate how to utilize these free APIs to extract emotional data from pictures and videos. Furthermore, the presentation will discuss how to transform the retrieved data into a single dataset, perform analysis, and visualize the results in R.

Nagy Tamás
Lead researcher / Lecturer, Synetiq / ELTE

Tamas obtained his PhD in psychology in Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. His main research interests are stress and emotions. From 2013, he has worked as the lead researcher of Synetiq, a Budapest based neuromarketing startup that conducts media research by analyzing emotional reactions of consumers using biometric sensors. Meanwhile, he is a lecturer in Eötvös Loránd University, where he teaches research methodology and data analysis in R.