Juan Antonio Álvarez

He defended his PhD in 2010 (Cum Laude unanimously). He got the Lecturer (Contratado doctor) position in 2011 and Associate Professor (Titular) in 2018. He has 2 national six-year research period and 1 transfer period (sexenios), 6 lecturer trienniums (2003-2021) and 3 quinquennia (2003-2018). He belongs to the research group TIC134 (Sistemas Informáticos). From 2003 he has been involved in research tasks and technology transfer. His research focuses on human activity, mobility and behaviour recognition and prediction using machine and deep learning techniques, gathering data with wearable sensors and/or cameras. He is author of more than 50 publications in international journals and congress, 2 patents and 2 registered software applications. In 2012 and 2013 he was chosen as Chair of Technical Committee of the international contest EvAAL for the track “Activity Recognition for AAL”, being this contest part of the European project FP7 UniversAAL (Project ID: 247950) where teams from leading Universities from the USA, EU and Japan took part in. He also was chosen as an expert on the technical committee of the competition Pedestrian Dead-Reckoning Challenge part of Ubicomp in 2015. He has participated in more than 20 public or privately funded R&D projects, being the director of 13 of them and he has also been a reviewer of several impact factor journals and international conferences.

From 2015 to 2022 he was software and product design mentor at Andalucía Open Future, a Spanish start-up accelerator established by Telefónica and Andalucía regional government. From 2013 to 2017 he was the main researcher and coordinator of HERMES (Healthy and Efficient Routes in Massive Open-Data Based Smart Cities-Citizen) a national R&D project where teams from 4 Spanish Universities (Vigo, Coruña, Carlos III and Seville) participate. Some tasks in HERMES project triggered off a new research area in the TIC134 group concerning Deep Learning applied to traffic sign recognition and classification. From 2018 to 2021, he leaded VICTORY (Vision and Crowdsensing Technology for an Optimal Response in Physical-Security) a national R&D project where violent attacks in a building are recognized using machine and deep learning from CCTV images and accelerometers sensors from smartphones workers. He also leaded a regional project TAL.IA, where deep learning techniques are being used to translate Sign Language to text, helping deaf people to communicate with hearing ones and a national project (proof of concept projects), DISARM focused to transfer the technology generated in VICTORY to adapt it to the industry and HORUS focused on analyze video from personal cameras. He is also transferring the results about violence detection to a Israel startup focused on kindergartens https://www.eyeknow.ai/ and to a EEUU startup https://www.cobaltrobotics.com/.
So far, the supervising and mentoring experience of Dr Álvarez García concerns 100 undergraduate students, 13 master’s degree students. He directed 2 PhD (2018 and 2019) and currently, he is supervising 3 PhD students. He has taught Spanish and English classes in several degrees (Computer Engineering, Technical Computer Engineering, Health Informatics) and Masters (Software Engineering and Technology), being the coordinator of several subjects related to algorithms and software technology. He also directed several courses focused on work-related technologies (Oracle, iOS and Android). He has carried out several research stays (Polytechnic University of Catalonia 2007 1 month, German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence 2011 3 months, Pisa University 2015 2 months and Slovenian Jozef Stefan Institute 2017 3 months).