Colloquium Cognitive Systems

Everyday Gaze Sensing and Analysis for Cognitive User Interfaces

Prof. Dr. Andreas Bulling (University of Stuttgart)

Abstract.  Everyday Gaze Sensing and Analysis for Cognitive User Interfaces
As human-computer interfaces become more sophisticated, they increasingly implement or imitate human perceptual, learning, and interactive skills. This gives rise to a new research area on cognitive user interfaces at the intersection of human-computer interaction, computer vision,  and machine learning. Human gaze is particularly promising for this new class of interfaces given its fundamental importance in human social communication, cognition, and intelligence and its close links to cognition and visual perception. However, current cognitive user interfaces only scratch the surface of the vast information contained in gaze, particularly in unconstrained daily-life settings. My research focuses on next-generation user interfaces that fully leverage human gaze to enable, support, and enhance human-machine interactions. In this talk I will present selected examples of my research towards this vision with a particular focus on computer vision methods for everyday gaze sensing as well as machine learning methods for gaze analysis and eye-based user modelling.

Bio. Andreas Bulling is Full Professor (W3) of Computer Science at the University of Stuttgart where he holds the chair for Human-Computer Interaction and Cognitive Systems. He is also Faculty at the International Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems (IMPRS-IS), Member in the Cluster of Excellence "Data-integrated Simulation Science" (SimTech), and partner of Pupil Labs GmbH. He received his MSc. (Dipl.-Inform.) in Computer Science from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, focusing on embedded systems, robotics, and biomedical engineering. He holds a PhD in Information Technology and Electrical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, Switzerland. Andreas was previously a Feodor Lynen Research Fellow and a Marie Curie Research Fellow in the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, UK, a postdoctoral research associate in the School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University, UK, as well as a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge. From 2013 – 2018 he was a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and an Independent Research Group Leader (W2) at the Cluster of Excellence on Multimodal Computing and Interaction (MMCI) at Saarland University. Andreas is UbiComp steering committee member and serves on the editorial boards of the Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable, and Ubiquitous Technologies, ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, and the Journal of Eye Movement Research. He served as co-chair, TPC member, and reviewer for major conferences, most recently as TPC co-chair for ACM UbiComp 2016 and IEEE PerCom 2015, associate chair for ACM ETRA 2016 and 2018 as well as ACM CHI 2013, 2014, 2018, and 2019, and general chair for ETRA 2020. He received an ERC Starting Grant in 2018.