Kairos Acquires Another Emotion Detection Firm

“Kairos’s announcement placed a particular emphasis on the capability of EmotionReader’s technology to overcome demographic bias, which has been detected in other facial recognition systems and has led to serious concerns about racial discrimination as such technologies are increasingly used for law enforcement and border control.”

Miami-based facial recognition specialist Kairos has acquired Irish startup EmotionReader.

Founded just last year, the latter is pretty much what it sounds like – a firm specializing in facial biometrics technology designed to assess’ subjects emotions through facial cues. It isn’t the first emotion detection company that Kairos has acquired, with the company having bought IMRSV back in 2015; but it looks like in EmotionReader, Kairos is interested in the overall sophistication of its face scanning technology, with Kairos highlighting EmotionReader’s “impressive R&D team” and the acquisition’s “potential IP opportunities” in a statement.

In fact, Kairos is going so far as to relocate its R&D team to Singapore, where much of the EmotionReader team is currently based. There, the team will be directed by Stephen Moore, an EmotionReader co-founder.

Kairos’s announcement placed a particular emphasis on the capability of EmotionReader’s technology to overcome demographic bias, which has been detected in other facial recognition systems and has led to serious concerns about racial discrimination as such technologies are increasingly used for law enforcement and border control. Kairos says its work with the EmotionReader team will entail “optimizing the algorithms to work without bias on all races, ethnicities, genders, and ages of faces,” adding later that the acquisition is “a proactive step” toward overcoming bias in facial recognition.

The companies did not disclose the value of the acquisition, but indicated that it is part of a multimillion dollar deal.

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July 13, 2018 – by Alex Perala