Ana Jofre

SUNY Polytechnic Institute, Utica New York

I present a method to simulate facial character development by accumulating an expressive history onto a face. The model analytically combines facial features from Paul Ekman's seven universal facial expressions using a simple Markov chain algorithm. The output is a series of 3d digital faces created in Blender with Python. The results of this work...

This paper presents a design study of the visualization interface to the Myant Skiin Connected Life App (Skiin), a family informatics application which will connect family members, friends, and caregivers, by engaging them together and enabling health and wellness related data sharing and support. It is based on Myant’s highly accurate intelligent...

We extracted 327,322 faces from an archive of Time magazine containing 3,389 issues dating from 1923 to 2014, classified the gender of each extracted face, and discovered that the proportion of female faces contained within this archive varied in interesting ways over time. The proportion of female faces first peaked in the mid-to-late 1940s. This...

We present metadata of labeled faces extracted from a Time magazine archive that contains 3,389 issues ranging from 1923 to 2012. The data we are publishing consists of three subsets: Dataset 1) the gender labels and image characteristics for each of the 327,322 faces that were automatically-extracted from the entire Time archive, Dataset 2) a subs...

We describe the development of web-based software that facilitates large-scale, crowdsourced image extraction and annotation within image-heavy corpora that are of interest to the digital humanities. An application of this software is then detailed and evaluated through a case study where it was deployed within Amazon Mechanical Turk to extract and...

We present a method by which to convert a large corpus of website traffic data into interactive and practical taste graph visualizations. The web-site traffic data lists individual visitors' level of interest in specific pages across the website; it is a tripartite list consisting of anonymized visitor ID, webpage ID, and a score that quantifies in...

The Sophi Heads-up Display (HUD) is an analytics tool developed for editors at Canada's The Globe and Mail newspaper that overlays relevant data about articles' performances onto The Globe and Mail website. We describe the motivation for our research, our design process (which includes initial needs assessment through semi-structured interviews wit...

Visualization scientists seek means to inspire insights from data, which require creative thinking on the part of analysts as well as cognitive reasoning. In information visualization a focus on the user has proven highly effective in the design of usable and engaging interfaces, although it has been argued that such a focus limits innovation in in...

The visualization of data elucidates trends and patterns in the phenomena that the data represents, and opens accessibility to understanding complicated human and natural processes represented by data sets. Research indicates that interacting with a visualization amplfies cognition and analysis. A single visualization may show only one facet of the...

We present a prototype for a Tangible User Interface designed for interactive data visualization, which we believe will be useful for facilitating collaborative work in data analytics. Our hybrid system combines a tabletop graspable user interface with a two-dimensional screen display; the users interrogate the data by manipulating tokens on the ta...

We present a prototype for a Tangible User Interface (TUI) designed to interactively query a database. While much work has been done on TUI, showing that they encourage collaboration and positively enhance user experience, few tangible systems have been designed specifically for data analysis tasks. Our system combines a tabletop (non-digital) gras...

The interactive visualization of topic models is a promising approach to summarizing large sets of textual data. Topicks is the working title for a means to visualize topic modelling outputs. Incorporating a radial layout, users can view the relationships between topics, terms and the corpus as a whole. Interacting with topic and term nodes, as wel...

This study involved the use of qualitative mixed methods to investigate the benefits of a touchscreen application we developed, called “Postcard Memories”, to aid older adults with early stage dementia. A thematic video analysis revealed participants found it meaningful to create and share personalized digital postcards with media (video, audio, p...

For the past 73 years, the CBC has disseminated a unique Canadian perspective across the world, producing a phenomenally rich multimedia record of the country and our social, political and cultural heritage, and news. This project proposes novel methods to display and browse through an enormous historical CBC Newsworld data corpus to enable an “on...

En este artículo se presenta un estudio de caso dentro del marco de la pedagogía constructivista del curso libre de orientación a la física Science, Techonology, and Society. Ponemos especial atención en los desafíos que conlleva el uso de la pedagogía constructivista en la enseñanza de la ciencia, una materia cuya filosofía es inherentemente reali...

Tangible user interfaces and physical representations of data are both promising approaches to improving insights derived from large data sets. Interactive tangible representations of data, which seamlessly combine those two approaches, potentially take advantage of cognitive processes, data representations, and interactions not supported by curren...

Light pressure effect has been discovered long ago and has been used as an optical method to manipulate micro- and nanoparticles. It is usually considered as a nonresonant effect determined by the transfer of the momentum of light. However, recently we have observed that large polystyrene microspheres of 15 - 20 μm diameters supporting high quality...

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We describe a method for molecular confinement and single-fluorophore sensitive measurement in aqueous nanodroplets in oil. The sequestration of individual molecules in droplets has become a useful tool in genomics and molecular evolution. Similarly, the use of single fluorophores, or pairs of fluorophores, to study biomolecular interactions and st...

Two 25 base-pair cDNA strands are encapsulated within an optically trapped nanodroplet, and we observe the kinetics of their hybridization in dynamic equilibrium via single-molecule fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) as a function of temperature and of the solution's NaCl concentration. We have observed the duplex unfolding and refolding...

We describe a novel method of generating monodisperse subfemtoliter aqueous droplets on demand by means of piezoelectric injection. Droplets with volumes down to 200 aL are generated by this technique. The droplets are injected into a low refractive index perfluorocarbon so that they can be optically trapped. We demonstrate the use of optical tweez...

Two 25 base-pair complementary DNA strands are encapsulated within an optically trapped nano-droplet, and we observe the kinetics of their hybridization in dynamic equilibrium via single molecule fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) as a function of temperature and of the solution's NaCl concentration. We have observed binding and unbindin...

We control and observe femtoliter volume reactions within aqueous nanodroplets. Chemical reagents sequestered in the nanodroplets mix when the nanodroplets are fused via optical manipulation. The subsequent reaction is probed by means of fluorescence excitation.

We have developed and describe a method to generate monodisperse optically-trappable aqueous emulsion droplets (“hydrosomes”) on demand by piezoelectric injection. The droplets have been measured to have radii as small as 368 nm ± 16 nm, corresponding to a volume of 212 aL ± 27 aL. The hydrosomes are injected into a perfluorocarbon continuous phase...

We inertially inject and study the contents of optically trappable aqueous nanodroplets (hydrosomes) emulsified in a perfluorinated matrix. A new piezoelectric actuated device for production of single hydrosomes on demand is introduced. Hydrosomes containing enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) were injected, optically trapped, and held at the...

We demonstrate a novel technique for creating, manipulating, and combining femtoliter to attoliter volume chemical containers. Possible uses include creating controlled chemical reactions involving small quantities of reagent, and studying the dynamics of single molecules. The containers, which we call hydrosomes, are surfactant stabilized aqueous...

We report on improvements and innovations in the use of hydrosomes to encapsulate and study single molecules. Hydrosomes are optically-trappable aqueous nanodroplets. The droplets are suspended in a fluorocarbon medium that is immiscible with water and has an index of refraction lower than water, so hydrosomes are stable and optically trapped by a...

We report on improvements and innovations in the use of hydrosomes to encapsulate and study single molecules. Hydrosomes are optically-trappable aqueous nanodroplets. The droplets are suspended in a fluorocarbon medium that is immiscible with water and has an index of refraction lower than water, so hydrosomes are stable and optically trapped by a...

We report on a new method to stabilize nanotube and vesicle structures created from amphiphilic diblock copolymers by means of photopolymerization. Cross-linking with UV light exposure minimizes fluid disruption during stabilization. Additionally, the spatial control afforded by focusing or masking the initiating light source enables stabilization...

We create long polymer nanotubes by directly pulling on the membrane of polymersomes using either optical tweezers or a micropipette. The polymersomes are composed of amphiphilic diblock copolymers and the nanotubes formed have an aqueous core connected to the aqueous interior of the polymersome. Stabilized membranes of nanotubes and vesicles were...

We create long polymer nanotubes by directly pulling on the membrane of polymersomes using either optical tweezers or a micropipette. The polymersomes are composed of amphiphilic diblock copolymers and the nanotubes formed have an aqueous core connected to the aqueous interior of the polymersome. We stabilize the pulled nanotubes by subsequent chem...

This work describes the design and construction of the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) apparatus at the University of Toronto. The aim of the experiment is to create a Bose-Einstein condensate out of a vapour cloud of 87Rb atoms using a combination of laser cooling, magnetic trapping and evaporative cooling. The design and construction of all of t...

We have used a technique of one-dimensional velocity selection to extract sub-microkelvin atoms from a cloud of laser-cooled atoms. By using a dipole-force barrier and a magnetic gradient, we have selected atoms as much as 25 times colder than the initial molasses. We present theory and experimental data showing that the selection efficiency can va...

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2004. Includes bibliographical references.