Colloquium Cognitive Systems

Gaze-based assistance for spatial decision making  
Dr. Peter Kiefer, ETH Zürich

Abstract: Adaptive and context-aware technologies have facilitated mobile systems which offer personalized and intelligent assistance by sensing and inferring the user's context. This talk proposes utilizing visual attention - measured by (mobile) eye tracking technology - as one type of context for geo-spatial assistive systems. Two types of visual attention are considered: gazes on a map, and gazes on 3D objects in the real environment. A gaze-based pedestrian wayfinding assistant could, for instance, adapt its behavior according to the user's visual attention to landmarks, and to the visual search behavior on the map. The talk discusses current developments and future perspectives for gaze-based geographic human computer interaction.  

Bio: Peter Kiefer is a group leader and senior researcher ("Oberassistent") at the Chair of Geoinformation Engineering at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He is leading the GeoGazeLab, a research group focusing on eye tracking for the analysis and interactive support of spatial decision making processes. Peter received his doctoral degree in Applied Computer Science (Dr. rer.nat.) in 2011 from the University of Bamberg, Germany (title: "Mobile Intention Recognition"). His research activities span the fields of Geographic Information Science, Human Computer Interaction, Eye Tracking, Spatial Cognition, and Artificial Intelligence.