Biography
An expert in image analysis, mobile application development, and computer science education, Paúl Pauca has combined his professional research and personal passion to help improve the lives of people all over the world.
When his son Victor was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder called Pitt Hopkins Syndrome that makes it difficult for him to communicate, Pauca and a team of Wake Forest students developed an iPhone/iPad app called VerbalVictor as an affordable alternative to expensive communication devices on the market. One of the first apps for assistive communication, VerbalVictor has been downloaded more than 15,000 times and featured by The Associated Press, USA Today and CNN. Pauca says that the experience of interacting with users of VerbalVictor around the country is particularly rewarding and has given him the impetus to start a new line of research, aiming to help those with special needs. More recently his team developed and tested a wearable device allowing people with ALS to interact with mobile devices via slight motions of the head.
Areas of Expertise (8)
Hyperspectral and LiDAR image analysis
Human-computer interfaces for disabilities
Mobile and pervasive devices
Computer Science Education
STEM and entrepreneurship
Pitt Hopkins Syndrome
Non-profit organization development
Parenting a Child with Special Needs
Media
Publications:
Documents:
Audio/Podcasts:
Education (3)
Duke University: Ph.D., Computer Science
Wake Forest University: M.S., Computer Science
Wake Forest University: B.S., Computer Science
Media Appearances (3)
Paul Pauca dreams up app to communicate with disabled son
NBC Latino
2012-09-18
“It shattered our world,” remembers Paul Pauca, Victor’s father, a Peruvian-born software engineering professor at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem. “It got dark and very, very negative.” But his wife, Theresa, a special education teacher, helped Pauca see things more clearly, telling him he had the option of “becoming bitter or better” and that waiting for him on the other side was his baby boy...
Example of campus innovations: Bat signal for blind
U.S. News & World Report
2015-01-06
He talked with computer science professor Paul Pauca, whose 9-year-old son has a rare genetic disorder which limits his language development. Pauca is always looking to find ways to use technology to help people with disabilities, and to make those devices cheaply enough that they can reach those in developing countries who need it...
Giving a voice to the voiceless
Inside Science
2014-06-05
Paul Pauca, a computer science professor at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, knows this firsthand. Pauca's son Victor has a rare genetic disorder that affects his ability to speak. “If you’re not able to communicate to express your needs, it can be very frustrating and maddening," said Pauca. So, Pauca decided to help his son out. Victor now uses apps developed by Pauca on a mobile device to communicate. With a simple touch of a button, he's got a voice...
Articles (5)
Detecting objects under shadows by fusion of hyperspectral and lidar data: A physical model approach
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Hyperspectral Image Signal Processes
Due to lack of direct illumination, objects under shadows often reflect significantly fewer numbers of photons into a remote hyperspectral imaging (HSI) sensor, leading to low radiance levels near to or below noise. Attempts to perform object ...
Iris segmentation for challenging periocular images
Handbook of Iris Recognition
This chapter discusses the performance of five different iris segmentation algorithms on challenging periocular images. The goal is to convey some of the difficulties in localizing the iris structure in images of the eye characterized by variations in illumination ...
Challenging ocular image recognition
SPIE Defense, Security, and Sensing
Ocular recognition is a new area of biometric investigation targeted at overcoming the limitations of iris recognition performance in the presence of non-ideal data. There are several advantages for increasing the area beyond the iris, yet there are also key issues ...
Iterative directional ray-based iris segmentation for challenging periocular images
Biometric Recognition
The face region immediately surrounding one, or both, eyes is called the periocular region. This paper presents an iris segmentation algorithm for challenging periocular images based on a novel iterative ray detection segmentation scheme. Our goal is to ...
High‐resolution imaging using integrated optical systems
Journal of Imaging Systems and Technology
Certain optical aberrations, such as defocus, can significantly degrade the signal collected by an imaging system, producing images with low resolution. In images with depth-dependent detail, such degradations are difficult to remove due to their inherent spatially ...