The Washington Post - 01.08.2019

A16 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.THURSDAY, AUGUST 1 , 2019

Economy & Business

MEDIA

Networks sue free

streaming service

The four major U.S. television
networks on Wednesday sued a
nonprofit group backed by AT&T
that streams TV channels over
the Internet free without
permission.
The lawsuit was filed in U.S.
District Court in New York by
CBS, Comcast’s NBCUniversal
Media, Fox Television Stations
and Walt Disney’s ABC against
Sports Fans Coalition NY and its
founder, David Goodfriend, a
former executive at satellite-TV
provider Dish.
Major broadcasters
traditionally charge cable and
satellite pay television providers
such as AT&T and Dish a fee to
distribute their content. By
giving viewers that content free,
the free service, Locast, is
threatening these fees.
“Locast has been operating for
more than a year and a half, and
no broadcaster has filed until
now,” said David Hosp, an
attorney representing
Goodfriend. Hosp said the
group’s nonprofit status and the
fact it was not charging for the
service put it on “sound legal
footing.”
Broadcasters disagreed.
“Locast is not the Robin Hood of
television; instead, Locast’s
founding, funding, and
operations reveal its decidedly
commercial purposes,” according
to the lawsuit.
— Reuters

LABOR

Survey: Small-business

hiring edged up in July

Small-business employment

edged up during July as owners

gingerly took on new hires.

That report came Wednesday

from payroll provider ADP,

which counted 11,000 new jobs at

its small-business customers,

those with up to 49 employees.

ADP’s smallest customers, those

with up to 19 employees, cut

18,000 jobs.

The slim overall increase in

hiring followed two months of

job cuts — small companies cut

13,000 jobs in June and 34,000 in

May, ADP said. That followed a

gain of 66,000 in April.

Small-business hiring has

been constrained by a confluence

of factors. Owners have been

conservative about adding to

their payrolls since the recession.

They have also struggled along

with larger companies to find

qualified workers partly because

they generally cannot offer the

salaries and benefits big

corporations do.

ADP said all of its business

customers created 156,000 jobs

in July.

— Associated Press

FOOD INDUSTRY

Impossible Burger gets

okay on color additive

The Impossible Burger, so far

only available at restaurants,

could finally be making its way to

U.S. grocery store shelves. It also

announced on Wednesday plans

to produce more of the meat-free

patties through a new

collaboration.

In response to a petition

submitted by Impossible Foods,

the Silicon Valley-based maker of

the burger, the Food and Drug

Administration has amended its

rules to call the use of soy

leghemoglobin safe as a color

additive in imitation beef,

clearing a key hurdle in the

company’s push to sell raw

product inside grocery stores.

The rule change is effective

Sept. 4, though petitioners still

have a chance to file objections.

The original petition filed in

December specified heme could

“not exceed 0.8 percent by

weight” of the final product.

Separately, the company said

it had signed a deal with global

food producer OSI Group to

expand production. OSI will

begin making the Impossible

Burger starting next month,

adding short-term capacity to

Impossible’s own Oakland, Calif.,

factory.

— Bloomberg News

ALSO IN BUSINESS

The annual wages and benefits

for U.S. workers rose in the

second quarter at a slightly slower

pace than the first, suggesting the

lowest unemployment levels in a

half-century have not been

triggering rapid gains in worker

compensation. The Labor

Department said Wednesday that

pay and benefits for all U.S.

workers increased 2.7 percent in

the April-June quarter from a

year earlier, down from a

2.8 percent rise in the first quarter

compared with a year ago. The 12-

month peak so far in this

expansion for wages and salaries

was a 2.9 percent gain for the

period ending in December 2018.

Pagani gave video-game fans a

first look Wednesday at the

multimillion-dollar hypercar it

will debut during Monterey Car

Week in California next month.

The Italian brand unveiled its

Huayra Roadster BC in the

popular Zynga game CSR Racing

2, which lets players drag race a

stable of over 150 meticulously

rendered vehicles. It’s the top-

grossing mobile racing game in

the United States, with a daily

haul of $60,068 and 12,593 new

installs, according to

ThinkGaming.com.

— From news reports

DIGEST

CHAIDEER MAHYUDDIN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Workers load yellowfin tuna into a truck at a fishing port in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, on Wednesday.



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CURRENCIES

$1=108.80 YEN; EURO=$1.

BY TAYLOR TELFORD

In just a handful of years, the
business of emotion detection —
using artificial intelligence to
identify how people are feeling —
has moved beyond the stuff of
science fiction to a $20 billion
industry. Companies such as IBM
and Microsoft tout software that
can analyze facial expressions
and match them to certain emo-
tions, a would-be superpower
that companies could use to tell
how customers respond to a new
product or how a job candidate is
feeling during an interview. But a
far-reaching review of emotion
research finds that the science
underlying these technologies is
deeply flawed.
The problem? You can’t reli-
ably judge how someone feels
from what their face is doing.
A group of scientists brought
together by the Association for
Psychological Science spent two
years exploring this idea. After
reviewing more than 1,000 stud-
ies, the five researchers conclud-

ed that the relationship between

facial expression and emotion is

nebulous, convoluted and far

from universal.

“About 20 to 30 percent of the

time, people make the expected

facial expression,” such as smiling

when happy, said Lisa Feldman

Barrett, a professor of psychology

at Northeastern University, who

worked on the report published

earlier this month. But the rest of

the time, they don’t. “They’re not

moving their faces in random

ways. They’re moving them in

ways that are specific to the situa-

tion.”

It’s not surprising that some-

thing as complex and internal-

ized as human emotion defies

easy classification. Humans tend

to instinctively draw on other

factors, such as body language or

tone of voice, to complete their

emotional assessments. But the

majority of emotion-detection AI

makes inferences purely on map-

ping facial positioning, a concept

that stems from the work of Paul

Ekman, a psychology professor at

the University of California at San

Francisco. He posited that six

emotions — happiness, sadness,

disgust, fear, anger and surprise

— are represented by universal

facial expressions across all cul-

tures.

When Microsoft rolled out its

emotion detection technology in

2015, it said its algorithms could

“recognize eight core emotional

states — anger, contempt, fear,

disgust, happiness, neutral, sad-

ness or surprise — based on uni-

versal facial expressions that re-

flect those feelings.”

It’s a common justification for

such technology, and exactly

what Barrett and her colleagues

are pushing back against. The

companies are not trying to be

misleading, she said, but they

need to dramatically change their

approach to emotion detection to

get the kind of accuracy that

many already purport to have.

(Microsoft declined to comment

on how or if the review would

influence its approach to emotion

detection.)

“We now have the tools and the

analytic capability to learn what

we need to learn about facial

expressions in context and what

they mean,” Barrett said. “But it

requires asking different ques-

tions with that technology and

using different analytic strategies

than what are currently being

used.”

Such technological limitations

come with risks, especially as

facial recognition becomes more

widespread. In 2007, the Trans-

portation Security Administra-

tion introduced a program

(which Ekman consulted on but

later distanced himself from) that

trained officers to identify poten-

tial terrorists via facial expres-

sion and behavior. A review of the

program in 2013 by the U.S. Gov-

ernment Accountability Office

found that the TSA hadn’t estab-

lished a scientific basis for it, and

that the program didn’t translate

to arrests. In 2017, a study by the

American Civil Liberties Union

concluded that the program fu-

eled racial profiling.

To get on the right track, Bar-

rett said, companies should be

working with far more data,

training their programs to con-

sider body language and vocal

characterization just as a human

would. At least one company says

it’s embracing the more multi-

faceted approach: Affectiva, the

first company to market “emotion

AI.” The company, which claims

to hold the largest collection of

emotion data in the world, works

with naturalistic video rather

than static images and is trying to

integrate such factors as a per-

son’s tone or gait into its analyses.

Rana el Kaliouby, Affectiva’s

co-founder and chief executive,

said she welcomes the review’s

findings, adding that they mirror

issues she has been trying to

tackle since she was a doctoral

candidate at Cambridge Univer-

sity in the early 2000s.

“I’ve tried to solve the same

issues all these years, but we’re

not there yet as an industry,”

Kaliouby said. “I liken it to the

emotional repertoire of a toddler:

A toddler will understand sim-

plistic states, but they won’t have

the language or sophisticated

sensing to recognize complex

emotions.”

Affectiva has encountered

these limitations organically in

the course of business and tried to

adjust to them, she said. Several

years ago, Kaliouby said, a client

complained that Affectiva’s tech-

nology wasn’t producing results

in China when it tried to analyze

responses to ads. It turned out

that the program had trouble

recognizing a subtle “politeness

smile” that many subjects dis-

played because of a lack of train-

ing specific to that region.

This helped highlight how dif-

ferent cultures display facial ex-

pressions, Kaliouby said, leading

Affectiva to incorporate “cultural-

ly specific benchmarks” for facial

movement. The company now

trains its systems with more than

8 million faces from 87 countries.

The industry will evolve as it

acquires more data, Kaliouby

said. In the meantime, the tech-

nology is already being put to use.

“The naive mapping that peo-

ple in academia and, unfortu-

nately, in the industry are doing is

quite dangerous, because you’re

getting wrong results,” Kaliouby

said. Often, she added, clients

aren’t interested in the more

comprehensive approach, asking

instead for analyses based on the

six basic emotions defined by

Ekman’s research decades ago.

Kaliouby said she hopes the

review will educate consumers

and those in the industry about

the limits of emotion recognition,

and reinforce how far the indus-

try has to go. The theoretical aim

for much artificial intelligence is

to create machines that are able

to operate just as well as, or better

than, a human.

But even creating a machine

with the perceptiveness of a per-

son wouldn’t be enough to solve

the problem of emotion detec-

tion, Kaliouby said.

“Humans get it wrong all the

time.”

[email protected]

‘Emotion detection’ AI has serious flaws, researchers say

Most systems rely on

facial expressions, ignore

tone and body language

BY LAURA REILEY

The Trump administration last
week revealed details of a $16 bil-
lion aid package for farmers hit in
the U.S.-China trade war, with key
provisions meant to avoid large
corporations scooping up big pay-
outs at the expense of small farm-
ers.
According to a report by the
nonprofit Environmental Work-
ing Group (EWG), most of the
$8.4 billion given out so far in last
year’s farm bailout went to
wealthy operations, exacerbating
the economic disparity with
smaller farmers.
An EWG analysis found that
the top one-tenth of recipients
received 54 percent of all pay-
ments. Eighty-two farmers each
received more than $500,000 in
trade relief.
DeLine Farm Partnership of
Charleston, Mo., has so far re-
ceived $2.8 million.
The top 1 percent of recipients
of trade relief received, on aver-

age, $183,331. The bottom 80 per-

cent received, on average, less

than $5,000, EWG said.

The Agriculture Department

said in a statement that the pro-

gram is designed to provide a

level of support proportionate to

a farm’s size and success. Pay-

ments were based on production.

The more acres they farm and

bushels per acre they produce,

the more assistance farmers re-

ceive.

“To our knowledge, USDA’s

payments have all been made in

accordance with our published

regulations and existing pro-

cedures,” the statement said.

“USDA follows producer eligibili-

ty protocols that are established

by Congress for other farm safety

net programs.”

In a year of trade tariffs, natu-

ral disasters and weather prob-

lems, and depressed commodity

prices, EWG senior analyst Anne

Schechinger said, some of these

farmers could be quadruple-dip-

ping from federal aid programs.

They may be receiving money

from either or both rounds of the

trade relief, agricultural-risk cov-

erage and price-loss coverage, as

well as crop insurance (especially

for those farmers who were un-

able to plant and took “prevent

plant” insurance payouts) and

finally money from the disaster

relief bill.

“These programs are designed

to give the most subsidy money to

the biggest farms; we don’t dis-

pute that,” Schechinger said. “But

for these huge farms that are

making tons of money each year,

is that really something taxpayers

should be subsidizing while

smaller farmers struggle?”

In 2018, payouts to individual

farmers hurt by the trade war

with China were capped at

$125,000; this time, the cap has

been raised to $250,000 per per-

son or legal entity, with a cap of

$500,000. Still, Schechinger said,

farmers can get around this easi-

ly.

“If your farm partnership has

20 people, each person could take

$125,000. You only have to be

‘actively engaged’ in farming, and

that is a super vague qualifica-

tion. It could mean that you call in

once a year to a shareholder

meeting.”

Some agricultural economists

say that changes to the second

round of trade relief payments

will further favor the largest

farmers by linking payments to

the number of acres, not the

number of bushels or bales pro-

duced.

In his weekly agricultural con-

ference call Tuesday, Sen. Charles

E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said the

EWG findings were in line with

his own views about farm pro-

grams.

“There should be a cap on them

because 10 percent of the farmers

get 70 percent of the benefits of

the farm program. The farm pro-

gram is meant to help people over

humps beyond their own con-

trol,” he said. “Some large farmers

do have the benefit of having

resources to get over those humps

without government help.”

According to EWG, nearly

28,000 farms have received pay-

ments from farm subsidy pro-

grams for 32 years straight. Total

subsidy payments across all pro-

grams in 2018, including the

trade relief package, totaled more

than $18 billion.

[email protected]

Richest farmers get most of bailout

DANIEL ACKER/BLOOMBERG NEWS

A soybean farm near Tiskilwa, Ill. The top one-tenth of recipients received 54 percent of payments so

far in the $16 billion package for farmers hurt by the U.S.-China trade war, a nonprofit found.

Aid package prompted by

trade war largely benefits

top producers, study says

“We’re not there yet

as an industry.”

Rana el Kaliouby,

CEO of Affectiva