 | |  | | Valentine C. Matula
Director, Multimedia Technologies Research
"My research is focused on using multimedia technologies to help enterprise employees communicate more effectively with customers and fellow employees." |
| My Research | In the last few years, the availability of powerful computers and multimedia consumer devices such as rack-mount blade processors, camera-cellphones and tablet PC’s have made it possible to put multimedia technology in the enterprise wherever it can be justified. The research of our department is focused on combining dialog and speech technology, acoustics, video, messaging, and graphics in a way that helps businesses take advantage of these technologies to improve their efficiency and effectiveness—thus giving them a competitive edge in today’s marketplace. |
| Projects | Video phones have been offered to the market on and off again for decades. Making a video call and seeing a far-away person during a call adds to the experience particularly when you have a relationship with that person—as a family member, as a trusted teller at a bank, or as your private attorney. However, when you call a business such as an airline, a retail store, or a credit card company, the relationship you have with the agent who takes the call is fleeting at best. On these calls, it may be more useful to see a menu of choices if dealing with an IVR system, or if talking to an agent you may want to see the product you want to buy instead of the agent. Having a system show product options, flight schedules, or bank balances while speaking with an agent could make the conversation more productive and thus more efficient. Our current Interactive Voice and Video Response project is creating such a system to display via the video channel useful displays for customers to see while interacting with self service systems or live agents. |
| Publications | A recent paper on NLCR was published as Improved LSI-Based Natural Language Call Routing Using Speech Recognition Confidence Scores, N. Tyson, V. Matula, EMNLP ’04. This paper was then expanded into a chapter in a book to be published, “"Intelligent Systems at the Service of Mankind, Volume 2", again with N. Tyson. I have three patents currently granted so far over my career with AT&T, Lucent, and Avaya. One addresses a system to control a tollfree/800 service to load balance incoming calls to multiple contact center locations; another deals with identifying calling card fraud on cards issued by a third party, and the third outlines how a caller’s accent can be taken into account to route their call to an agent with appropriate language skills. In addition, I have numerous applications in process to the USPTO—you can see the ones made public by searching on www.uspto.gov |
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