Research Archives | Page 10 of 11 | Visual Computing BLOG

Eye Tracking – The Next Big Thing for Automatic Driving

Nowadays a big vision of the automotive industry is autonomous driving. Since Google’s introduction of autonomously driving cars, car manufacturers, their suppliers, but also IT companies and the scientific community are excited about the upcoming revolution of transportation. The biggest advantages of autonomous driving are a higher driving comfort, and assumed the driving systems work reliably, a better driving safety. But there are many issues that have to be resolved until autonomous driving can be fully realized.

Provenance: On and Behind the Screens

Melanie Herschel and I gave a tutorial at this year’s ACM SIGMOD conference in San Francisco. ACM SIGMOD is one of the important conferences in the field of data engineering and management. Our tutorial with the title “Provenance: On and Behind the Screens” covered the two topics provenance and visualization, and discussed how provenance information can be visualized.

Improve Image Compression by Using Human Visual Attention Property

Humans are the end users of visual media. Therefore, in order to develop an effective quantitative assessment of visual computing quality, one must take into account how humans perceive visual quality. For example, in image compression, an adaptive bitrate allocation that favors the image foreground can be expected to increase the visual quality of decoded images.

A Visual Analysis of Political Debates

Political scientists, linguistis and computer scientists at the University of Konstanz developed an automatic system for the analysis and visualization of political communication. Their software – a result of the interdisciplinary BMBF-funded project VisArguea – allows to draw conclusions with respect to the deliberative quality of political discourse. One use case is the Stuttgart 21 mediation which took place in 2010 and aimed at resolving the conflicts around the railway and urban development project in Stuttgart (Germany).

Paul Kiparsky in Konstanz

On the 23rd of June, Paul Kiparsky, professor of linguistics at Stanford University and honorary doctor of the Department of Linguistics of the University of Konstanz, gave a talk at the 50th anniversary workshop of the lingustic department in Konstanz in which he talked about “The Konstanz Approach: An Appreciation and an Emulation”.

EuroVA and EuroVis 2016 in Groningen, Netherlands

In early June I had the opportunity to join this years EuroVis in Groningen in the Netherlands. This conference is in the top two academic events when it comes to visualization and visual analytics, so I was excited to being able to attend this event. Together with colleagues from the University of Konstanz I enjoyed a week of learning about the latest research in the field, meeting and socializing with experts from around the globe.

Back from CHI 2016

Last month we had the pleasure to attend the CHI’16 conference in San José, USA. ACM CHI is the international top conference for Human-Computer Interaction. It brings together top researchers from academia and industry from around the world.

Visualization of Eye Tracking Data

Knowing where people look at when they investigate visual stimuli such as pictures and video content provides valuable information for multiple application scenarios. The investigation of viewing behavior has become a popular approach that provides a glimpse into the human mind. May it be a person sitting in front of a computer screen or walking in the park, different eye-tracking devices can record where and how long a person spent visual attention for nearly all possible visual stimuli. Depending on the device, up to 2000 gaze positions per second and the visual stimulus can be recorded for an individual person. Typically, many more persons are recorded in a user study, and the goal is to compare this massive amount of data in order to find similarities as well as outliers in the viewing behavior.

How does steering engagement influence our susceptibility to distractions?

Vehicle handling is a task that places high demands on our visual system. When driving a car, we have to constantly attend to visual factors such as our distance to the car in front of us, our lane-position, road-signs, and more. Therefore, perceptual distraction during driving can be expected to impair our ability to handle a vehicle. Nonetheless, some levels of distractibility can sometimes be beneficial – it can grant us access to unanticipated events that might be relevant. In our new article, published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, we investigate how neural activity changes in order to maintain the balance between driving performance and the perception and processing of events outside of the focus of our visual attention.

Untangling Networks – or How to Focus on Less to See More

Can you imagine the social connections people had at the beginning of the 20^th century? They had their family and a strong connection to neighbors. Most probably friends were living in the same village or in the next town. You could have painted a bubble for each person you knew on one sheet of paper and even would have had room enough to put the name in the middle – a network easy to analyze. One century later we are dealing with huge networks that allow us to model and study many real world phenomena since they are capable of representing pairwise relations between the items of interest. Arlind Nocajs’ graduate thesis “Untangling Networks: Focus on Less to See More” emphasizes certain aspects using various visualization techniques and graph drawing methods.

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