It is our pleasure to welcome Sailin Zhong, who has started as a postdoctoral researcher in our lab. Sailin holds a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Her research in our group will focus on collaborative 3D sketch mapping, extending our ongoing work on novel 3D sketch mapping methods.
Kevin has left us for his new position as Professor of Spatial Computing and 3D Technologies at the Institute of Interactive Technologies at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW) in Windisch, Switzerland.
We thank him for the contributions he has made to the geoGAZElab during his PostDoc time, in particular in the scope of the 3D Sketch Maps project. All the best, and let’s stay in contact!
We have joined the Design++ initiative. We’re looking forward to an interesting and fruitful interdisciplinary exchange with other members of Design++.
We’ll be using the Design++ infrastructure in the scope of the MSCA Doctoral Network Eyes4ICU. Controlled eye tracking experiments will be performed in the immersive Audiovisual Room of the Large-scale Virtualization and Modeling Lab.
We’re happy to welcome Johanna Wörle, who has started as a postdoctoral researcher at the Singapore ETH Centre. In the scope of the Future Resilient Systems 2 research program, her research will focus on the effects of stress on human performance. Johanna holds a PhD in psychology from Ulm University, Germany.
In the scope of the MSCA Doctoral Network Eyes4ICU, our doctoral students Lin Che and Yiwei Wang are investigating novel ways of using eye tracking for the improvement of location-based services. They presented and discussed their research at the 18th Conference on Location Based Services in Ghent, Belgium, last week.
Congrats, Lin, for receiving the best short paper award!
Work-in-progress papers (DOI assignment pending):
A video introducing the Eyes4ICU project (an MSCA Doctoral Network) is now available on YouTube:
In collaboration with colleagues from TU Vienna, we have published a full paper in the proceedings of this year’s GIScience conference, taking place next week in Leeds, U.K.:
The demand for instructions during wayfinding can be considered as an important indicator of the internal cognitive processes during wayfinding. In the paper, we are predicting instruction demand in a real-world wayfinding experiment with 45 participants using different environmental, user, instructional, and gaze-related features. Being able to predict instruction demand can, for instance, be beneficial for navigation systems that adapt instructions in real-time, based on their users’ behavior.
Alinaghi, N., Kwok, T. C., Kiefer, P., & Giannopoulos, I. (2023). Do You Need Instructions Again? Predicting Wayfinding Instruction Demand. In 12th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2023). Schloss Dagstuhl-Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik.
Peter Kiefer will be serving as one of the Full Paper Chairs for the ETRA 2024 conference, taking place in Glasgow, U.K., 4-7 June 2024.
Please check out the Call for Papers!
The geoGAZElab has been part of the ETRA community for many years. We’re happy to continue contributing to this vibrant community, pushing forward excellent research in this exciting field.
We have an open position (Postdoc/Senior Researcher/Research Engineer) at the Singapore-ETH Centre, based in Singapore.
In collaboration with a Singapore agency, we will study stress and stressors during crisis response in a virtual reality (VR) training environment. The project is part of the research programme “Future Resilient Systems“.
We’re glad to announce that our colleague Luis Lutnyk has successfully defended his dissertation on “Pilot Decision-Making Support through Intelligent Cockpit Technologies”. Congratulations, Luis!
What a great first event of the Eyes4ICU MSCA doctoral network! During a 1-week Winter School on Reisensburg Castle (close to Ulm, Germany), Peter, Lin and Yiwei met the other consortium members and the advisory board of Eyes4ICU.
The Winter School consisted of courses on eye tracking, computational modeling, and transferable skills. We kicked off the doctoral candidate projects by meeting the co-supervisors and partners and, certainly, this was a great opportunity for social networking.
A perfect start for Lin and Yiwei, who have just started on the project this month!
Our participation in this MSCA doctoral network is funded by the State Secretariate for Education, Research and Innovation. We’re grateful to have Esri as a partner for our doctoral candidate projects.
We’re happy that two new doctoral students have joined our team, Lin Che and Yiwei Wang. They’re both part of the MSCA doctoral network “Eyes for Interaction, Communication, and Understanding (Eyes4ICU)”. Lin will be working on
Gaze-supported Trip Recommendation (DC6), Yiwei on Gaze-supported Travel Experience Logging (DC12). Welcome!
What an exciting way of starting into the new year!
Our Winter School on “Eye Tracking – Experimental Design, Implementation, and Analysis” took place in the second week of January on Monte Verità in Ascona, Switzerland. A total of 36 participants attended, with a large variety in terms of research background.
With her virtual keynote, Enkelejda Kasneci (TU Munich, Germany) opened the Winter School, in which she presented her research “On opportunities and challenges of eye tracking and machine learning for adaptive educational interfaces and classroom research”. Over the five days of the Winter School, participants learned about the different steps involved in performing eye tracking experiments, starting from experimental design, over data collection and processing, to statistical analysis (speakers: Nina Gehrer, University of Tübingen, Germany; Andrew Duchowski, Clemson University, S.C., US; Izabela and Krzysztof Krejtz, SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Poland). In hands-on sessions, participants designed and performed their own small eye tracking experiments.
The Winter School also enabled exchange between participants, through group work, poster presentations, and an excursion. The atmosphere of Monte Verità offered the perfect atmosphere and surroundings for this.
Thanks to all who have made this possible, especially our speakers and all sponsors!
Exciting news! The geoGAZElab will be participating in the MSCA Doctoral Network “Eyes for Interaction, Communication, and Understanding (Eyes4ICU)” as an Associated Partner, funded by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation.
Eyes4ICU explores novel forms of gaze-based interaction that rely on current psychological theories and findings, computational modelling, as well as expertise in highly promising application domains. Its approach to developing inclusive technology by tracing gaze interaction back to its cognitive and affective foundations results in better models to predict user behaviour. By integrating insights in application fields, gaze-based interaction can be employed in the wild.
In the scope of Eyes4ICU, 12 doctoral candidates (DC) will be working at 7 different host institutions across Europe. Out of these, 2 DCs will be hosted at the geoGAZElab of ETH Zurich (PI: Peter Kiefer). They will be working on the topics Gaze-supported Trip Recommendation (DC6), and Gaze-supported Travel Experience Logging (DC12) respectively.
We are looking for two highly motivated doctoral candidates, starting at the earliest possible date: Position announcement.
We congratulate Tiffany C.K. Kwok for successfully completing her doctoral thesis on “Designing Unobtrusive Gaze-Based Interactions: Applications to Audio-Guided Panorama Viewing”. The doctoral graduation has been approved by the Department conference in their last meeting. The research was performed in the scope of the LAMETTA project.
Tiffany is staying with us for a PostDoc, continuing her research in the geoGAZElab. It’s great having you in our team, Tiffany!
We’re looking forward to our Winter School, taking place in January 2023.
Exciting updates to the program are now included in the updated announcement:
We’re glad that Prof. Dr. Enkelejda Kasneci (Technical University Munich) will be opening the Winter School with a keynote titled “On opportunities and challenges of eye tracking and machine learning for adaptive educational interfaces and classroom research“.
We’d like to thank the following sponsors, whose generous support will enable us to support several young researchers with a travel grant:
Application for travel grants is open until 15 October 2022.
The Winter School is a great opportunity for getting trained on eye tracking methodology, experimental design, and analysis. At the same time, it will facilitate networking with speakers, sponsor representatives, as well as among participants.
Our team is growing further: we’re so happy to have Tianyi Xiao on board, who is joining the 3D Sketch Maps project as a doctoral student. Welcome!
We are co-organizing an ETH Winter School on “Eye Tracking – Experimental Design, Implementation, and Analysis” which is going to take place in Monte Verità (Ticino), Switzerland, from 8 to 13 January 2023. Download the first announcement as PDF.
The Winter School targets at PhD students and early PostDocs (coming from any research field) who are using, or planning to use, eye tracking in their research. Internationally recognized experts will provide lectures and hands-on sessions on eye tracking methodology, experimental design, and analysis.
The registration for the Winter School is now open.
Building on the successful 2016 Winter School, the 2023 School will be updated to focus on state-of-the-art software (licensed and open-source, e.g., PsychoPy and Pupil Labs) and hardware. Hands-on exercises will focus on table-mounted eye trackers.
We’re excited to welcome Kevin Gonyop Kim, who has now started as a postdoctoral researcher in the 3D sketch maps project. Welcome to the team, Kevin!
We now have a page on LinkedIn, where we’ll be sharing some our updates from now on. Follow us and get connected!
Fabian Göbel has successfully completed his doctoral thesis on “Visual Attentive User Interfaces for Feature-Rich Environments”. The doctoral graduation has been approved by the Department conference in their last meeting. Congratulations, Fabian!
After his thesis defense, Fabian has started a research internship at Microsoft on the topic of interaction with HoloLens 2. We wish him all the best and thank him for all the contributions he has made to our research!
In addition to the open PhD position, which has been announced here earlier, we’re also offering an open PostDoc position in the 3D Sketch Maps project.
We’re very much looking forward to the start of the 3D Sketch Maps project, for which we have now announced an open PhD position: Interaction with 3D Sketch Maps in Extended Reality.
The 3D Sketch Maps project, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation in the scope of the Sinergia funding program, investigates 3D sketch maps from a theoretical, empirical, cognitive, as well as tool-related perspective, with a particular focus on Extended Reality (XR) technologies. Sketch mapping is an established research method in fields that study human spatial decision-making and information processing, such as navigation and wayfinding. Although space is naturally three-dimensional (3D), contemporary research has focused on assessing individuals’ spatial knowledge with two-dimensional (2D) sketches. For many domains though, such as aviation or the cognition of complex multilevel buildings, it is essential to study people’s 3D understanding of space, which is not possible with the current 2D methods. Eye tracking will be used for the analysis of people’s eye movements while using the sketch mapping tools.
The 4-year project will be carried out jointly by the Chair of Geoinformation Engineering, the Chair of Cognitive Science at ETH Zurich (Prof. Dr. Christoph Hölscher), and the Spatial Intelligence Lab at University of Münster (Prof. Dr. Angela Schwering).
Interested? Please check out the open PhD position on the ETH job board!
We’re glad that Adrian Sarbach has joined the geoGAZElab as a doctoral student on the project “The Expanded Flight Deck – Improving the Weather Situation Awareness of Pilots (EFDISA)“.
Adrian has, among others, studied at EPFL (Bachelor) and at ETH Zurich (Master), obtaining his degrees in electrical engineering. He wrote his MSc thesis in collaboration with Swiss International Air Lines, on the topic of tail assignment optimization.
Kuno Kurzhals has left us for his new position as Junior Research Group Lead in the Cluster of Excellence Integrative Computational Design and Construction for Architecture (IntCDC) at the University of Stuttgart, Germany.
We wish him all the best and thank for the contributions he has made to the geoGAZElab during his PostDoc time!
We are excited that we receive funding from the Swiss Federal Office of Civil Aviation (BAZL) for a new project, starting in July 2021: “The Expanded Flight Deck – Improving the Weather Situation Awareness of Pilots (EFDISA)“. The project aims at improving contemporary pre-flight and in-flight representations of weather data for pilots. This will allow pilots to better perceive, understand, and anticipate meteorological hazards. The project will be done in close collaboration with industry partners and professional pilots (Swiss International Air Lines & Lufthansa Systems).
We are looking for a highly motivated doctoral student for this project. Applications are now open.
After a Corona-caused delay in the hiring process, we’re excited to announce that Suvodip Chakraborty will start as a PhD student in our Singapore-based project on Communicating Predicted Disruptions in the scope of the Future Resilient Systems 2 research program. Suvodip will start in January 2021.
Suvodip holds a Master of Science from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. His Master thesis was titled “Design of Electro-oculography based wearable systems for eye movement analysis”.
As last year, we are involved in the organization of ETRA 2021, the ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research & Applications. Peter is again co-chairing the Demo&Video Track, for which the Call is now available online. The submission deadline is 2 February 2021.
Pilots not only have to make the right decisions, but they have to do it quickly and process a lot of information – especially visual information. In a unique project, ETH Zurich and Swiss International Air Lines have investigated what the eyes of pilots do in this process.
Martin Raubal, Professor of Geoinformation Engineering at ETH Zurich, appreciates the practical relevance of this research collaboration, which could contribute to increasing flight safety. Anyone who wants to develop it further should take off their blinders and think outside the box, says Christoph Ammann, captain and instructor at Swiss. And ETH Zurich is an ideal partner for this.
Watch the video on Vimeo!
We have revised and redesigned our website (http://geogaze.ethz.ch/), including a new logo. Have a look!
