2019-09-04: Invited Talk at ODU CS Summer Research Workshop: Eye Tracking for Predicting ADHD

This summer 2019, ten students from B.N.M Institute of technology, fourteen students from Acharya Institute of Technology, and one student from Ramaiah Institute of Technology participated for the Summer Research Workshop organized by Ajay Gupta and the CS department at ODU. Over the past few years, this workshop has enabled participants to collaborate with various research groups and join ODU for graduate degrees. One of the main goals of this annual workshop is to  encourage the undergraduate students to actively engage in research activities.

I was invited to give a talk in one of the session on the topic of "Eye Tracking for Predicting ADHD".  The slides are available at: https://www.slideshare.net/GavindyaJayawardena/eye-tracking-for-predicting-adhd.

I was able to make it interactive by introducing a couple of eye trackers (PupilLabs tracker and Tobii 4pc) from our lab to the audience.  I covered the following topics in the first half of my talk: eye tracking, what do we exactly do in eye tracking, muscles of the eye, basic eye movements, why eye tracking is important, applications of eye tracking, and a short demonstration of eye trackers. The second half of my talk was primarily about my research work about predicting ADHD using eye tracking data, information about my collaborations (Dr. Anne Michalek from ODU Special Education), what is ADHD, participants, the task of the experiment, our research interests, how did we predict ADHD, and results of our study. Finally, I wrapped up my talk with a demonstration of a machine learning software Weka.

It was exciting to see that the students were really excited about the prospects of using eye trackers in their future research studies. They genuinely enjoyed testing out some of our eye trackers, the PupilLabs Core Eye Tracker which has a world camera and it is wearable. Some students wanted me to share details about where to purchase eye trackers as they were interested in conducting a user study for their final year project. They also had questions about how to set up a study with eye trackers as well and what features to collect.  Since this year's Summer Research Workshop participants were asked to work in groups to research on detecting Alzheimer patients aggression in real-time, some students were interested in using the eye tracking in their studies and to build a proof-of-concept. 

I would like to thank my adviser Dr. Sampath Jayarathna and Ajay Gupta for giving me the opportunity to present our research work at the workshop.

--Gavindya Jayawardena (@Gavindya2)

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