Dr.  Juan Pablo Wachs

Juan Wachs (http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~jpwachs/) is the James A. and Sharon M. Tompkins Rising Star Associate Professor in the Industrial Engineering School at Purdue University. He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor of Surgery at Indiana University School of Medicine. He is the director of the Intelligent Systems and Assistive Technologies (ISAT) Lab at Purdue, and he is affiliated with the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering. He leads the Intelligent Systems and Assistive Technologies (ISAT) Laboratories at Purdue. Dr. Wachs received his B.Ed.Tech in Electrical Education in ORT Academic College, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem campus. His M.Sc and Ph.D in Industrial Engineering and Management from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. He completed postdoctoral training at the Naval Postgraduate School’s MOVES Institute under a National Research Council Fellowship from the National Academies of Sciences. He pioneered the field of gesture interaction in healthcare, for applications in the operating room and austere environments. He co-authored a Best Paper Award Finalist IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, was awarded the 2012 Air Force Summer Faculty Fellowship Program (SFFP), awarded IEEE Appreciation Award for outstanding contribution to the success of Spring 2012 Section Conference. He is the recipient of the 2013 Air Force Young Investigator Award, co-authored the poster presentation award AAAI 2015. He was also awarded the 2015 Helmsley Senior Scientist Fellow, and he is the 2016 Fulbright Scholar and the 2017 Rising Star Professor. He is the technical advisor to “prehensile technologies” which looks at how to develop technologies to improve peoples with disabilities’ wellbeing. He is a member of IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society, Affiliate, Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering at Purdue University, Member of ORSIS Operations Research Society – Israel, Member of the IIE (Institute of Industrial Engineers). He has published more than 100 research papers and participated in the organization of conferences and scientific meetings, and session chair of the IEEE SMC 2011; part of the Program Committee of the IEEE 3rd International Workshop on Human Behavior Understanding (HBU 2012) as part of IROS 2012; of CIARP 2012; 2013 SPIE Real-Time Image and Video Processing Conference; RITA 2014-2015; Program Committee, AMi 2014, and AE for ICRA 2017. He served as guest editor of Pattern Recognition Letters, Special Issue on Robust Recognition Methods for Multimodal Interaction, 2013, Journal of Real-Time Image Processing, Special Issue on Pattern Recognition Methods for Real-Time Image Processing, and Guest Editor of Human-Computer Interaction journal, Special Issue on Body Sensing and Tracking in Healthcare, 2014. He is also the Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions in Human-Machine Systems, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, and the Journal of Real-Time Image Processing. His research interests include human-machine interaction, gesture recognition and assistive robotics.

• Gist of a Gest: Can Machines Recognize ?Almost? Spontaneous Gestures?
  Humans are able to understand meaning intuitively and generalize from a single observation, as opposed to machines which require several examples to learn and recognize a new physical expression....
• TEDx: Wisdom in our Hands ? What gestures tell about our intentions?
  In this talk, I will discuss the importance of natural physical expression as means for interacting with devices, machines and robots in the healthcare domain. While the main discussion focus is...
• Teleproctoring with Mixed Reality: A Comparative Evaluation in the Context of Lower-Limb Fasciotomies
  Combat trauma injuries require specialized and immediate assistance. It is estimated that 1,000-2,000 lives were saved by tourniquet application during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan using it as...
• Towards Lifelong Learning Machines (L2L): How can zero shot learning lead to L2L ?
  One shot learning is a paradigm in learning theory that explores the ability of machines to recognize a certain class or category of objects from observing only a single instance of it....
• Wisdom in our Hands ? The Laban Transform for the Generation of Constrained Gesture Lexicons