Dotin seeks to mine data from your unconscious mind

Data mining has been a great way to get insights into our conscious decisions. But Dotin figured out that 95 percent of human decisions are made by the unconscious mind, and so the startup has developed a way to draw insights from those decisions.

Ganesh Iyer, founder of Dotin, said in an email that the company has developed an artificial intelligence engine that can tap into the subconscious mind of humans and gain powerful business insights. The company is demoing the technology at CES 2017, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas this week.

The San Jose, Calif.-based company competes with the likes of IBM Watson, but Watson focuses more on people’s conscious behavior. Iyer said his company can capture the equivalent of a digital personality fingerprint with its Digital Personality Signature Software.

The business-to-business AI engine captures your social data, such as your Facebook page data, and 10 images that you provide it. From that data, the software looks for patterns within the images that reflect the user’s subconscious mind. The company said that data like this can be used to generate sales leads, do target marketing, and help with employee hiring decisions.

Of course, there is the issue of user privacy. Iyer said, “We leverage the public information of users that they already have in the open. Also, as our analysis is agnostic of objects, it helps HR to not worry about any color or person discrimination. Moreover, this will be a part of the decision-making — but not the only one to make a decision.”

The company asks users to take a personality assessment. The software extracts positive personality attributes, negative personality attributes, compatibility personality matches, Hollands Occupational Insights, Gardner’s multiple intelligence and learning style, employment affinity, employment non-affinity, colors affinity, product-buying affinity, product-buying non-affinity, and buying preferences.

Iyer said four pilot customers are using this software to solve a couple of different pain points. One of the potential customers is San Jose State University.

“I find it very close to me.. I was really amazed!” said Jean-Yves Leonnec, chief architect at Orange, in a statement regarding the personality assessment.

Iyer shared his own personality assessment. The ultimate goal isn’t to invade everyone’s privacy; it’s about “accelerating the personalization of every device around us.”

I took the test and found the results mildly interesting. I don’t think they were particularly accurate or inaccurate, as the descriptions were somewhat vague. I am very curious about the technology, though.