Two hours in Hollywood: A manually annotated ground truth data set of eye movements during movie clip watching

In this short article we present our manual annotation of the eye movement events in a subset of the large-scale eye tracking data set Hollywood2. Our labels include fixations, saccades, and smooth pursuits, as well as a noise event type (the latter representing either blinks, loss of tracking, or physically implausible signals). In order to achieve more consistent annotations, the gaze samples were labelled by a novice rater based on rudimentary algorithmic suggestions, and subsequently corrected by an expert rater. Overall, we annotated eye movement events in the recordings corresponding to 50 randomly selected test set clips and 6 training set clips from Hollywood2, which were viewed by 16 observers and amount to a total of approximately 130 minutes of gaze data. In these labels, 62.4% of the samples were attributed to fixations, 9.1% – to saccades, and, notably, 24.2% – to pursuit (the remainder marked as noise). After evaluation of 15 published eye movement classification algorithms on our newly collected annotated data set, we found that the most recent algorithms perform very well on average, and even reach human-level labelling quality for fixations and saccades, but all have a much larger room for improvement when it comes to smooth pursuit classification. The data set is made available at https://gin.g- node.org/ioannis.agtzidis/hollywood2_em

Space-variant spatio-temporal filtering of video for gaze visualization and perceptual learning

Dorr, M., Jarodzka, H., & Barth, E. (2010). Space-variant spatio-temporal filtering of video for gaze visualization and perceptual learning. In C. Morimoto & H. Instance (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2010 Symposium on Eye Tracking Research & Applications ETRA ’10 (pp. 307-314). New York, NY: ACM.We introduce an algorithm for space-variant filtering of video based on a spatio-temporal Laplacian pyramid and use this algorithm to render videos in order to visualize prerecorded eye movements. Spatio-temporal contrast and colour saturation are reduced as a function of distance to the nearest gaze point of regard, i.e. non- fixated, distracting regions are filtered out, whereas fixated image regions remain unchanged. Results of an experiment in which the eye movements of an expert on instructional videos are visualized with this algorithm, so that the gaze of novices is guided to relevant image locations. Results show that this visualization technique facilitates the novices’ perceptual learning

Movement of \u3ci\u3eHypophthalmichthys\u3c/i\u3e DNA in the Illinois River Watershed by the Double-Crested Cormorant (\u3ci\u3ePhalacrocorax auritus\u3c/i\u3e)

Paired throat and cloacal swabs, along with feather samples, from nesting Double-crested Cormorants (Phalacrocorax auritus) at two sites in Illinois, USA, were tested for presence of invasive bigheaded carp (Hypophthalmichthys spp.) DNA. We also used DNA from the feather calamus to determine cormorant sex. Throat and cloacal swabs from cormorants at both locations tested positive for DNA from silver carp (H. molitrix), but none tested positive for bighead carp (H. nobilis). Hypophthalmichthys DNA was not detected on feathers. There were no significant differences among positive Hypophthalmichthys DNA detection frequencies between cormorant sexes. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of silver carp as part of the Double-crested Cormorant diet in North America. Hypophthalmichthys are major invasive species of concern in this region, the detection of water-borne environmental DNA of Hypophthalmichthys is an important monitoring tool, and the potential movement of DNA via piscivorous birds may have significant implications for interpreting environmental DNA monitoring data

Impacts of colonial waterbirds on vegetation and potential restoration of island habitats

Colonial waterbirds have impacted forested island ecosystems throughout their breeding range, changing vegetation, and soil characteristics and bird communities. Our objectives were to (1) determine effects of three levels of colonial waterbird exclusion on overall vegetation diversity and growth, and survival of a candidate restoration species (black elderberry; Sambucus nigra canadensis); (2) investigate effects of different planting techniques on survival and growth of black elderberry; and (3) determine effects of waterbird colonization on soil chemistry. In 2012, we investigated effects of three levels of waterbird exclusion (none control plots [CON]; partial, which excluded waterbirds larger than gulls [PEX]; and full which excluded all waterbirds [FEX]) on bird use, existing vegetation growth and diversity, and survival of planted black elderberry on three islands in Door County, WI, Lake Michigan. In 2013, we evaluated survival of black elderberry established with four planting treatments within three waterbird exclusion treatments on two islands in 2013.We also compared soil chemistry characteristics between islands with and without nesting waterbirds for 2 years. Overall plant growth was greater in exclosures, but elderberry survival was similar among treatments. Soil replacement and weed suppression planting treatments did not affect survival, but generally increased overall elderberry biomass. Soil from nesting islands was more acidic and had greater nutrient concentrations than reference islands. Exclusion or removal of colonial nesting waterbirds from islands may improve overall vegetation growth, but successful restoration of woody vegetation may require significant soil manipulation and planting

Citation Handling for Improved Summarization of Scientific Documents

In this paper we present the first steps toward improving summarization of scientific documents through citation analysis and parsing. Prior work (Mohammad et al., 2009) argues that citation texts (sentences that cite other papers) play a crucial role in automatic summarization of a topical area, but did not take into account the noise introduced by the citations themselves. We demonstrate that it is possible to improve summarization output through careful handling of these citations. We base our experiments on the application of an improved trimming approach to summarization of citation texts extracted from Question-Answering and Dependency-Parsing documents. We demonstrate that confidence scores from the Stanford NLP Parser (Klein and Manning, 2003) are significantly improved, and that Trimmer (Zajic et al., 2007), a sentence-compression tool, is able to generate higher-quality candidates. Our summarization output is currently used as part of a larger system, Action Science Explorer (ASE) (Gove, 2011)