EYE-AS-AN-INPUT FOR IMPROVING INTERACTIVE INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

In this work, Publication Access Through Tiered Interaction and Exploration (PATTIE) is presented with the eye as an additional input modality. PATTIE is built upon the scatter/gather information retrieval paradigm where users can explore a visual and interactive table-of-contents metaphor for large-scale document collections in an iterative manner. Additionally, the prototype has been integrated with eye-tracking through the web camera and experimental findings are provided to demonstrate a proof-of-concept for interest modeling at the term level and implicit relevance feedback on the gold standard inaugural 2019 Text REtrieval Conference Precision Medicine dataset (TREC PM). Low error rates for gaze tracking, and acceptable performance on binary classification of interest are reported as well as statistically significant increases in precision and recall performance for relevant information on a TREC PM task when PATTIE is used with eye-as-an-input versus a baseline PATTIE system.Doctor of Philosoph

Eye tracking for human robot interaction

Humans use eye gaze in their daily interaction with other humans. Humanoid robots, on the other hand, have not yet taken full advantage of this form of implicit communication. We designed a passive monocular gaze tracking system implemented on the iCub humanoid robot [Metta et al. 2008]. The validation of the system proved that it is a viable low-cost, calibration-free gaze tracking solution for humanoid platforms, with a mean absolute error of about 5 degrees on horizontal angle estimates. We also demonstrated the applicability of our system to human-robot collaborative tasks, showing that the eye gaze reading ability can enable successful implicit communication between humans and the robot