Ana C. Andrés Del Valle

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Manager, Accenture Technology Labs

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Research Interests
Multimedia technologies, games, health and telecommunications.

Related fields: Computer graphics, image and signal processing, human computer interfaces/interaction, E-learning and knowledge management.

Current Projects

TV SENTINEL: TV Services Enhanced through Internet and Game Experience Leverage.

For the past 10 years, interactive TV has been presented as a way to bring new, appealing services to home entertainment that could compete with what the Web-PC platform provides around audiovisual experience. Being that the Web is a more flexible and standard SW platform, not only has audiovisual content become accessible bypassing TV but also new social entertaining experiences have been created to complement that passive audiovisual consumption. Serious competition has appeared and the increase of Web advertising compared to TV advertising is just one of the signs (or consequences) of the turning point.

Some years ago the broadband-to-the-home scenario was already taken into account, and most media and entertainment companies have been working since to make sure that the Web experience could also be accessible from TV (the same way that the TV experience is starting to be accessible from the Web).

Nevertheless, most efforts seem focused on tackling a TV-only or Web-only approach to the challenges. The TV-only approach is taken by most MSOs (cable companies, telecom companies). In the Labs we believe that there is a lot to learn and to leverage from what has been developed for the Web and for the gaming industry that can be blended into the TV experience without replication, but by extension of capabilities at the level of the consumer experience.

Former Projects

Integrated Context Extension Tool (Ice T)
2009

Ice T is an Outlook add-in with an interface designed to encourage employees to share (pass along, discuss, work together) documents in a centralized location from early stages of work interaction (which usually happens by e-mail). The aim of encouraging centralizing the sharing of documents from the beginning of a potential collaboration is to make collaborative software and hardware needed in Next Generation Collaborative Spaces become part of the teams and also give them access to those documents.

We piloted the tool among 50 people at Accenture. If you want to know more about it, do not hesitate to contact me.
Next-Generation Collaborative Spaces (aka ADEN)
2008-2009

The Accenture Distributed Expert Network project looked into innovative ways of using different media interfaces like high-definition Interfaces, persistent Internet-based whiteboards, etc. Evolving in this area of research, Next-Generation Collaborative Spaces analyzes the importance of the working space itself, the technology used in that space and the possibility of have remote working sessions using these new collaboration hardware and software to bring the performance of remote teams at the level of collocated teams.

The ADEN team works with high-definition videoconference providers to experiment with the concept of virtual workshops within the labs.
Face Morphing for Medical Applications
2007-2008

Accenture Technology Labs and the University of California San Diego collaborated on a project to help doctors assess how efficient visual self-reflection and feedback are in encouraging children and their parents to keep up a healthy diet and active life.

Obesity is becoming a major health issue in Western countries. Doctors are looking for new means to prevent the so called “plague of the new century” from spreading by making children and parents realized the effects of their nutrition and lifestyle on their adult lives.

Using software developed by the Accenture technology Labs that alters child photographs, doctors can show the children thiner and/or fatter, giving doctors another tool to impress upon the children and their parents the importance of their behavior.

With this study, both ATL and UCSD want to find out how persuasive visual feedback for medical purposes can be.

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Advanced Communication Platform
2007-2008

In business, collaboration of distributed teams happens synchronously and asynchronously. Although the volume of asynchronous exchanges between remote teams has been increasing in recent years, important decisions, urgent matters and management issues are still mainly discussed during face-to-face meetings.

Besides information, trust, respect, interest and appreciation are created during face-to-face conversations. These values are mainly derived from visual cues that we get from our interlocutors. To design a communication system capable of leveraging the human experience, it is necessary to consider the social, professional and task protocols associated to the collaboration taking place.

Both the technical and the cultural context are needed to provide the most adequate channel and device to perform a specific collaboration task. Furthermore, the users must retain control of the system and the system should be tailored to their business and personal needs.

The ACP project explores how to exploit the environment, cultural and technical context when putting communications into place by defining collaboration services in a human-centered way that is then translated to technical solutions that suit the working teams.
POBICOS: Platform for Opportunistic Behaviour in Incompletely Specified, Heterogenous Object Communities
2008

The POBICOS project targeted communities of regular objects with embedded sense-compute-actuate nodes, found in homes and buildings. Such objects are inherently heterogeneous in sensing, actuating and computing resources/capabilities.

Moreover, the actual mix of objects available in different settings is practically unknown at the development time. Thus, the main challenge of applications is to take the best possible advantage of whatever resources happen to be available at runtime.

We refer to this as “opportunistic behavior.” The goal of POBICOS was to design, implement and test a platform that simplifies the task of developing and deploying opportunistic applications in such heterogeneous and incompletely specified object collections.

The platform included:
- Appropriate middleware-based programming model and mechanisms.
- An implementation of the middleware on embedded motes.
- Application testing, deployment and monitoring tools.
The Persuasive Mirror: "Using one's reflection to improve lifestyle"
2006-2007

Captology is a recent science that studies computers as persuasive technologies. The persuasive mirror project was designed to motivate healthy living and improving self-image. To achieve our goals we replicated a mirror using video technology and stereoscopy. By means of synthetic visual enhancements we modified the reflection of the user to produce positive emotions and reactions in him/her.
The Remote Boss
2007

Managers spend a great amount of time traveling. Consequently, they spend less and less time looking after their teams, thus reducing personal and professional interaction.

The Remote Boss project explored the potential of using technology to embody the presence of managers in a working space while they are away. Providing the manager with the tools to remotely control his counterpart technological representation, we studied whether it is feasible and useful to have such interaction.

Patents
Andrés del Valle, A. C.
Gaming System
EU Patent filed June 2008.

Andrés del Valle, A. C.
Fattening/Thinning Morphing Algorithm
U.S. Patent filed February 2007.

Andrés del Valle, A. C.
System Architecture to Support Face Morphing (and Morphing in General) in Medical Applications
U.S. Patent filed January 2007.

Selected Publications

Book Chapters

Knowledge-based E-learning in Virtual Enterprises
Ana C. Andrés del Valle
Encyclopedia of Networked and Virtual Organizations, Putnik & Cuhna (Ed.)
Idea Group Publishers, ISBN 978-1599048857
December 2007.
Face Motion and Expression Analysis on Monocular Images
Ana C. Andrés del Valle
Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, pp., Mehdi Khosrow-Pour (Ed.)
Idea Group Publishers, ISBN 1-59140-553-X
January, 2005
Techniques for Face Motion and Expression Analysis on Monocular Images
Ana C. Andrés del Valle and Jean-Luc Dugelay
3D Modeling and Animation: Synthesis and Analysis Techniques for the Human Body, pp. 201-234, Sarris and Strintzis (Ed.), IRM Press, ISBN 1-59140-299-9
July, 2004

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Journals

Digital Facial Image Modification, Body Image and Parental Support for Dietary and Physical Activity Behaviors.
J.S. Huang, K. Becerra, G. Golnari, S. Fernandez, A. Opalach, and A. C. Andrés del Valle
Journal of Pediatrics. Elsevier Ed.
September 2008.

Best Practice: Intelligent Home Services Initiative
A. C. Andrés del Valle, M. Mesnage, and A. Opalach
Gerontechnology. Vol. 5 Issue: 2 pp. 118-120
July 2006

Efficient Ocular Expression Analysis for Synthetic Reproduction
Ana C. Andrés del Valle and Jean-Luc Dugelay
IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. Vol. 8, Issue 1, pp: 70-80.
February 2006

Conferences

From Reach to Engage: Harnessing the Marketing Potential of Interactive TV
Ana C. Andrés del Valle
EuroITV 2010. Industry session.
Tampere, FIN, June 2010

Evaluating Weight Perception using Digital Facial-image Feedback
Ana C. Andrés del Valle, Jeannie Huang, Karen Becerra, Susan Fernandez,
CHI 2009. New Technologies and Interactions.
Boston, US.
April 2009

MorphMed: Evaluation of Weight and Weight-related Health Perceptions Using Digital Facial Image Alteration in Children and Parents
Jeannie S Huang, M.D., M.P.H., Karen Becerra, D.D., Golnaz Golnari, M.D., Susan Fernandez, M.D., Javier Cano Brabezo, Agata Opalach, Ph.D. and Ana C Andres del Valle, Ph.D.
2008 Pediatric Academic Societies’ & Asian Society for Pediatric Research Joint Meeting
May 2008

Making Meetings More Efficient: Towards a Flexible, Service Oriented Framework for Ubicomp Technologies
A. C. Andrés del Valle and M. Mesnage
Ubiquitous Computing in the office workshop @ UBICOMP
Innsbruck, Austria
September 2007

Digital Reflection: Simulating the Mirroring Effect
A. C. Andrés del Valle, J. Cano and A. Bekkali
Proceedings of the International Conference on Image Processing 2006. October 2006. Atlanta, US.
[Abstract] [Paper (PDF, 984KB)]

The Persuasive Mirror
A. C. Andrés del Valle and A. Opalach
Proceedings of Persuasive 2006. May 2006. Eindhoven, Netherlands.
[Abstract] [Paper (PDF, 1.35MB)]

Proposing Daily Visual Feedback as an Aide to Reach Personal Goals
A. C. Andrés del Valle and A. Opalach
Virtual Storytelling
Third International Conference ICVS 2005, Nov-Dec 2005, Strasbourg, France.
LNCS Series Vol 3805/2005 pp. 32-40. Proceedings
[Abstract] [Paper (PDF, 501KB)]

Enhanced Reflection to Encourage Healthy Living
A. C. Andrés del Valle and A. Opalach
Ubiquitous Computing to Support Fitness workshop at UBICOMP, September 2005, Tokyo, Japan.
[Abstract] [Paper (PDF, 259KB)]

Globally Supporting the Elderly Well-being Using Suitable HCI
A. C. Andrés del Valle, M. Mesnage and A. Opalach
HCI and the Older Population workshop at British Human Computer Interaction, September 2005, Edinburgh, UK.
[Abstract] [Paper (PDF, 300KB)]

The Persuasive Mirror: Computerized Persuasion for Healthy Living
A. Andrés del Valle and A. Opalach
Human Computer Interaction International, HCI International, July 2005, Las Vegas, US.
[Abstract] [Paper (PDF, 589KB)]

Please click here to view an extended list of publications on Talking Heads (Avatars & Model Adaptation), Face Cloning (Facial Expression Analysis on Monocular Images) and Mixed Reality (Enhancing Natural Video with Synthetic Objects)

Education