Componica’s mobile app is able to read the facial and emotional responses of students while they take tests.
Ten years ago, Steven Mitchell felt continually frustrated with the lack of real-world applications for machine learning and computer vision technology.
So with his Ph.D in electrical engineering and a background in image processing, he founded Componica, a company to implement all the ideas he wanted to see come to life. Self-funded for over a decade, Componica is now setting its sights on the future with emotion-reading education software for mobile devices.
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At first, the Iowa City-based company mostly worked on projects related to computer vision work, like tracking smoke from smokestacks or figuring out building dimensions from aerial photography automatically.
“Then in 2008, iPhones came into existence. We discovered you could develop programs for them, and we ended up creating a language-learning flashcard application called Memorize Words,” Mitchell told SPN.
Memorize Words turned out to be a hit, and Componica took off. Mitchell hired a team of full-time developers and part-time staff, and the company continued to create mobile apps in the education arena partnering with others, including Iowa City-based startup Higher Learning Technology, Illuminate Education and The Learning Egg.
Then Mitchell decided to switch gears.
“We wanted to get back to our roots of creating products, since that was our original vision, and we specifically wanted to apply computer vision to something mobile app-based,” he said. “A lot of our competitors were making emotional reading software, and trying to find a consumer base for their products.
“But we realized we already had these great partnerships in education software development. We didn’t have to go through the process of discovering new needs for affective computing.”
That’s when Componica started focusing on emotion-reading software—ideally, a mobile app that literally “reads” the emotional state of students during test-taking.
“This is a high-risk, high-reward project and it’s really interesting,” said Carolyn Scherf, who works in product design at Componica. “Nowadays, so many of our interactions are mediated by mobile devices, regardless of industry. As this hardware becomes more ubiquitous, we’re looking for the gaps, asking questions like, ‘What are we losing from face-to-face interactions when we use mobile devices, and what opportunities are there for us and our partners as we make the next generation of educational products?
“Educators have long known there’s a relationship between emotion and learning. We want to leverage our experience in computer vision, machine learning and mobile development to build a platform that will monitor what students see on a screen, and figure out the relationship between what they see and their emotional state. We want to generate data not just on performance, but on student frustration, boredom, fatigue, levels of engagement, factors that have a huge impact on sustained learning.”
Componica plans to work in conjunction with Learning Egg, for whom they previously developed Lightning Grader, a web-based application that lets educators create assessment tools, grade tests and create robust reports about student and class performance.
Lightning Grader is essentially a substitute to the Scantron system; it uses optical technology to quickly grade tests and assessments created by teachers online, and then the answers and questions can be shared easily with colleagues. It functions as a combination of a test-grading product and a gradebook system.
Mitchell thinks there are all sorts of opportunities for possible markets for mobile-based emotion-reading applications, such as electronic testing companies like ETS, Pearson and ACT, as well as general teachers and instructors. While Componica’s current focus is on the education sector, the app has potential for future application in the medical, arts, entertainment and customer service sectors.
The project remains in its early stages, but Componica recently received an Innovation Grant from the University of Iowa to support further development and research.
“So much in education is about standardized testing and school performance, and educators want a better understanding of how, why and where students are getting stuck on problems during test-taking,” Mitchell said. “We have the opportunity to help provide more holistic, real data about the whole picture of the student. A lot of kids have mobile devices in their hands now, and our company can offer a solution to improve learning.”
Credits: Images courtesy of Componica.
