2023-06-20: ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications (ETRA) 2023 Trip Report

By -


The 15th Annual ACM Symposium of Eye Tracking Research & Applications (ETRA 2023) was a fully hybrid conference, with the in-person event at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and virtual attendees joining via Webex Events. ETRA 2023 conference took place from May 30 to June 2, 2023. We (Yasasi and Gavindya) attended the conference in person and virtually.

ETRA brings together computer scientists, engineers, and behavioral scientists for enhancing eye-tracking research and applications. This year, 13 full papers were presented at ETRA 2023 and published in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (PACMHCI). In addition, 23 short papers were accepted and presented in the poster sessions at ETRA 2023.

Conference Venue - Neue Aula, University of Tubingen

Doctoral Symposium

On the first day of the ETRA 2023 conference, the Doctoral Symposium took place. The doctoral symposium is where Ph.D. students get an opportunity to present their thesis work, meet other students and experienced researchers in the eye-tracking domain to get feedback, and have a meeting with a mentor panel to discuss future research and career plans. This year, Dr. Sampath Jayarathna served as a Doctoral Symposium Co-Chair with Dr. Arantxa Villanueva. Yasasi from ODU presented her doctoral research titled “Evaluating Human Eye Features for Objective Measure of Working Memory Capacity” at the ETRA 2023 Doctoral Symposium.
Prof. John Paulin Hansen from the Technical University of Denmark delivered the keynote of the Doctoral Symposium, titled “An Universal Design Perspective on Gaze Interaction: From 30 Years of Research Through Design”. Prof. Hansen shared his insights on the upcoming Apple XR glasses and he predicted that it can revolutionize eye tracking for ubiquitous gaze-based interactions such as accessible visual aid systems.
Following the keynote speech, seven Ph.D. students from the eye-tracking field presented their work at the Doctoral Symposium session.

Keynote 1

The second day of the conference started with the keynote by Prof. Elizabeth Anne Krupinski, Vice Chair for Research, Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, Emory University School of Medicine. In her keynote titled “Medical Image Perception Through the Eyes of the Observer”, Prof. Krupinski talked about gaining medical image perception using eye-tracking tools for interpretation and treatment decision-making. She further discussed the importance of considering both technology and human factors to optimize and integrate these tools into clinical practices.

Session 1: Eye Tracking for Cognitive Analysis and Learning 

The first full paper session at ETRA 2023 began with Dr. Krzysztof Krejtz, presenting their paper on “A Unified Look on Cultural Heritage: Comparison of Aggregated Acanpaths between Experts and Non-experts in Architecture”. In this paper, the authors presented an analysis to compare the aggregated scan path visualizations by using second-order gaze analysis metrics such as coefficient K and gaze transition entropy. This paper won the best paper award at ETRA 2023.
Next, Salwa Aljehane presented the full paper, “Studying Developer Eye Movements to Measure Cognitive Workload and Visual Effort for Expertise Assessment”. This paper presents an analysis of the eye movements of experts and novice users while solving program comprehension tasks and the results show a significant increase in pupil size in the novice group indicating higher cognitive effort in the novice users compared to the experts.
Following that, Aakash Bansal from the University of Notre Dame, USA presented their paper, “Towards Modeling Human Attention from Eye Movements for Neural Source Code Summarization”. In this work, they proposed a model for source code summarization using a graph neural network (GNN) towards modeling human attention. The last presentation of the ETRA 2023 Session 1, “Classification of Alzheimer's using deep-learning methods on webcam-based gaze data” by Anuj Harisinghani.

Session 2: Gaze-based Interaction and Applications

The second paper session began with Omar Namnakani from the University of Glasgow, UK, presenting their paper titled, "GazeCast: Using Mobile Devices to Allow Gaze-based Interaction on Public Displays". This paper proposes and evaluates a novel system that leverages users’ handheld mobile devices to allow gaze-based interaction with surrounding displays. This paper won the COGAIN best paper award at ETRA 2023.
Next, Nora Horanyi from the University of Birmingham, UK, presented their full paper on "G-DAIC: A Gaze Initialized Framework for Description and Aesthetic-Based Image Cropping". This paper proposes a new gaze-initialized optimization framework to generate aesthetically pleasing image crops based on user description. The authors have extended the existing description-based image cropping dataset by collecting user eye movements corresponding to the image captions. Their experiments show that the proposed gaze-initialized optimization framework reduced the runtime by 92.11%.
Then, Sean Anthony Byrne from MoMiLab of the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy, presented their full paper on “Exploring the Effects of Scanpath Feature Engineering for Supervised Image Classification Models”. This paper presents thirteen sets of scan path designs incorporating different eye-tracking feature representations from data recorded during a task-based viewing experiment. The authors have evaluated each scan path design by passing the sets of images through a standard pre-trained deep learning model as well as an SVM image classifier. Results show an average accuracy improvement of 25 percentage points between the best-performing set and one baseline set.
Next, Scott Stone from the Neuroscience & Mental Health Institute of University of Alberta, Canada, presented their full paper titled “Unconscious frustration: dynamically assessing user experience using eye and mouse tracking”. This paper evaluates a menu navigation task based on a popular video game to assess two populations: a local cohort, and a remote cohort using two different eye trackers (monitor-mounted hardware, and a webcam-based algorithm).
The final presentation of the second session at ETRA 2023 was conducted by Marian Sauter on “EduEye: Eye Tracking in Learning and Education”. This presentation was an overview of the EduEye workshop.

Keynote 2

On the third day at ETRA 2023, Dr. Yusuke Sugano, associate professor at the Institute of Industrial Science, University of Tokyo, delivered the second keynote titled "Toward Appearance-based Gaze Estimation Open to Diverse People and Environments". This keynote speech was sponsored by the Reality Labs at Meta. Dr. Sugano talked about the history of appearance-based gaze estimation, introduced his recent research attempts, and discussed the aspects necessary to make this technique truly open to the real world.

Session 3: Eye Tracking Beyond Desktops

The third session at ETRA 2023 started with the presentation on "Exploring Gaze-assisted and Hand-based Region Selection in Augmented Reality" by Rongkai Shi. In this work, they presented the techniques they developed for region selection in Augmented Reality (AR) Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs), which leveraged users' hand and gaze for unimodal or multimodal interaction.
Next, Yaxiong Lei presented "DynamicRead: Exploring Robust Gaze Interaction Methods for Reading on Handheld Mobile Devices under Dynamic Conditions". He presented their gaze scrolling techniques they designed to support touch-free, page-scrolling on a reading application. These techniques are based on gaze gesture, dwell time, pursuit, and reading speed. Their results indicate that gaze gesture and dwell time-based interfaces are more robust while walking and gaze gesture has achieved consistently good scores on usability while not causing high cognitive workload.
Then, Noora Alsakar presented their work on “Investigating Privacy Perceptions and Social Aspects of Eye Tracking on Handheld Mobile Devices”. In this work, they conducted a user study where the participants were asked to use a smartphone eye-tracking app and were interviewed before and after viewing a video showing the amount of sensitive and personal data that could be derived from eye movements, and had their privacy concerns measured. The findings of this work showed factors that influence users' and bystanders' attitudes toward eye-tracking on mobile devices and supported the designing mechanisms to allow for privacy-aware eye-tracking solutions on mobile devices.
Finally, “The Salient360! Toolbox: processing, visualizing, and comparing gaze data in 3D” paper was presented at ETRA 2023 by Erwan David. He presented Salient360! Toolbox which implements functions to identify saccades and fixations and output gaze characteristics, to generate saliency maps, fixation maps, and scan path data. It also implements routines made to compare gaze data that were adapted to 3D.

Session 4: Machine Learning Methods and Algorithms for Eye Tracking

The fourth paper session began with Fei Chang from the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences(CAS), China, presenting their paper titled “Gaze Pattern Recognition in Dyadic Communication”. In this paper, authors have re-defined five static gaze patterns that cover all the status during a dyadic communication and propose a network to recognize these mutually exclusive gaze patterns given an image. They have annotated a benchmark, called GP-Static, for the gaze pattern recognition task, on which their method experimentally outperforms other alternate solutions.
Finally, Wolfgang Fuhl from the University of Tübingen, presented their paper titled “Area of interest adaption using feature importance”. This paper presents two approaches and algorithms that adapt areas of interest (AOI) or regions of interest, respectively, to the eye-tracking data quality and classification task. The first approach uses feature importance in a greedy way and grows or shrinks AOIs in all directions. The second approach is an extension of the first approach, which divides the AOIs into areas and calculates a direction of growth, i.e. a gradient. Both approaches improve the classification results considerably in the case of generalized AOIs.

Posters

Since the conference was held both in-person and virtually this year, the posters were displayed physically and on the Webex Events Platform. There were 60 posters presented in the poster sessions. This includes 23 short papers, 30 late-breaking contributions, and 7 doctoral consortium papers.

Yasasi presented her poster titled “Evaluating Human Eye Features for Objective Measure of Working Memory Capacity” in the Poster Session 2 of the conference. She presented her poster in person and virtually on the Webex Events platform.
Poster - Evaluating Human Eye Features for Objective Measure of Working Memory Capacity

Town Hall Meeting

After four successful days, ETRA 2023 ended with the town hall meeting with general chairs Dr. Frederick Shic (University of Washington) and Dr. Enkelejda Kasneci (University of Tübingen, Germany). During the meeting, next year’s general chairs, Mohamed Khamis (University of Glasgow, UK) and Yusuke Sugano (University of Tokyo, Japan), announced that the ETRA 2024 will be held in Glasgow, Scotland.


-- Yasasi (@Yasasi_Abey) and Gavindya (@Gavindya2)

Comments

Post a Comment