Eyes4ICU – DC 12 | geoGAZElab

Gaze-supported Travel Experience Logging

This project is part of the MSCA Doctoral network “Eyes for Interaction, Communication, and Understanding (Eyes4ICU)”, in which we participate as an Associated Partner.

Eyes for Interaction, Communication, and Understanding

Gaze is an important communication channel to be captured remotely which works even without language. It thus holds great potential for universal inclusive technologies. Eyes for information, communication, and understanding (Eyes4ICU) explores novel forms of gaze interaction that rely on current psychological theories and findings, computational modeling, as well as expertise in highly promising application domains. Its approach of developing inclusive technology by tracing gaze interaction back to its cognitive and affective foundations (a psychological challenge) results in better models to predict user behavior (a computational challenge). By integrating insights in application fields, gaze-based interaction can be employed in the wild. Accordingly, the proposed research is divided into three work packages, namely Understanding Users (WP1), Gaze Communication (WP2), and In The Wild (WP3). All three work packages are pursued from three different perspectives: a psychological empirical perspective, a computational modeling perspective, and an application perspective, ensuring a unified and aligned progress and concept. Along these lines, training is also divided into three packages of Empirical Research Methods (WP4), Computational Modeling (WP5), and Transferable Skills (WP6). Consequently, the consortium is composed of groups working in psychological, computing, and application fields. All Beneficiaries are experts in using eye tracking in their respective areas ensuring best practices and optimal facilities for research and training. A variety of Associated Partners from the whole chain of eye tracking services ensures for applicability, practical relevance, and career opportunities by contributing to supervision, training, and research. This will advance communication by eye tracking as a field and result in European standards for gaze-based communication in a variety of domains disseminated through research and application.

Objectives: Doctoral Candidate (DC) 12

Experience logging techniques can contribute to improving personal reflection (e.g., well-being, performance) and sharing of experiences (e.g., using social media). The idea of the project is to enhance experience logging with gaze in order to help the user reflect about her experiences of moving through some spatial setting. Since travelers are particularly exposed to novel experiences, tourism is chosen as an example domain. The goals of the project are therefore: 1) To design novel approaches for gaze-supported travel experience logging that can be used for improving personal reflection and sharing of experiences. In general, these approaches could be applied in tourism, therapy, and behavior analysis. 2) To log travel data in the wild, including gaze, video, GPS, and physiological signatures (e.g., heart rate). These will be complemented with data from questionnaires (during travel) and a visual support tool (after travel) used to annotate critical events (e.g., changes in emotion and preferences). 3) To train and validate automatic classifiers for critical events based on different features of the collected data and the respective annotations. 4) To develop a visual support tool that provides spatio-temporal summaries and visualizations of the collected data. These summaries are essential for personal reflection and dissemination. Here, the classifier will complement the visual support tool by providing event categories for non-annotated data. The visual support can be applied to improve classifier training (e.g., by active learning).