SAGA 2013: 1st INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON SOLUTIONS FOR AUTOMATIC GAZE DATA ANALYSIS –
uniting academics and industry.

24-26 October 2013 Bielefeld University, Germany
Workshop Website: http://saga.eyemovementresearch.com/

The SAGA 2013 workshop is accepting abstracts for two calls: Challenge Contributions as well as Oral Presentation or Posters.
We are currently pursuing possible options for publication of a special issue in a journal or as an edited volume.

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Important Dates:

1. Oral presentation / poster call:

August, 23, 2013: Deadline for abstract submissions.
September, 6, 2013: Notification of acceptance for talks and posters.

2. Challenge:

August, 23, 2013: Deadline for 2-page preliminary abstract sketching your approach.
September, 6, 2013: Notification of acceptance for challenge.
October, 2, 2013: Submission of the final abstracts and final results.

October, 24-26, 2013: Workshop takes place at Bielefeld University, Germany.

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Invited keynote speakers from academia and industry:

Marc Pomplun, UMASS Boston, United States of America
Ben Tatler, University of Dundee, Scotland
Michael Schiessl, Managing Director of EyeSquare (User & Brand Research) in Berlin, Germany
Andreas Enslin, Head of Miele Design Centre in Gütersloh, Germany
Ellen Schack, v. Bodelschwinghian Foundations of Bethel in Bielefeld, Germany

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We are very pleased to publish this second call for challenge contributions and abstracts for SAGA 2013, the 1st International Workshop on Automatic Annotation of Gaze Videos. SAGA 2013 will focus on automatic solutions for the automatic annotation of gaze videos and research work on eye movement analysis in natural environments as a trailblazer for mobile eye-based interaction and eye-based context-awareness.

We are providing a forum for researchers from human-computer interaction, context-aware computing, robotics, computer vision and image processing, psychology, sport science, eye tracking and industry to discuss techniques and applications that go beyond classical eye tracking and stationary eye-based interaction.

We want to stimulate and explore the creativity of these communities with respect to the implications, key research challenges, new techniques and application areas. The long-term goal is to create a strong interdisciplinary research community linking these fields together and to establish the workshop as the premier forum for research on automatic annotation of gaze videos.

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Submissions:

Abstracts will be peer-viewed by at least two members of an international program committee. Word and LaTex templates for the submissions are now available on the workshop website and the registration is open.

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1. Oral presentation / poster call: #
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We are calling for 500-word abstracts on topics related to real-world eye tracking and eye movement analyses. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, eye tracking in human-machine interaction, visual search, language processing, eye-hand coordination, marketing, automatized tasks, and decision making.

Please note: All accepted contributions must register for the workshop.

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2. Challenge: #
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In order to drive research on software solutions for the automatic annotation of gaze videos we offer a special challenge on this topic. The purpose of the challenge is to encourage the community to work on a set of specific software solutions and research questions and to continuously improve on earlier results obtained for these problems over the years.

We are providing a set of test videos on the workshop website (duration 2-3 minutes) and separate text files with the corresponding gaze data for which solutions for semi- and fully-automatic software solutions for the recognition and tracking of objects over the whole video sequence shall be written. The software should provide the coordinates for the tracked objects and use this information to automatically calculate object specific gaze data, such as number of fixations and cumulative fixation durations. There are no restrictions on the way in which the relevant objects are marked and on which kind of techniques can be used to track the objects.

The only constraint is that your software solution can read and process the provided videos and reports gaze specific data for the selected objects either as a text file (which can serve as input for a statistical program such as SPSS, Matlab, R oder MS Excel) or by providing some kind of visualization.

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Detailed information on the participation and a description of all necessary steps can be found on the workshop website (see: http://saga.eyemovementresearch.com/challenge/howto-participate-in-the-challenge/). Additionally, you can now find an explanation of the manual annotation procedures which we will be used to evaluate the submitted software solutions for the challenge(http://saga.eyemovementresearch.com/challenge/videomaterial/).

In order to access this page, you first must register for the challenge (see: http://saga.eyemovementresearch.com/challenge/register-for-the-saga-challenge/).

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All submissions will be evaluated by an independent jury according to the evaluation criteria (see Workshop Website). Additionally, there is a live session scheduled for the third day in which all selected solutions can be demonstrated to the interested workshop participants. The three best solutions will receive an award.

Prize money:

1. Price: 1,000,- €
2. Price: 500,- €
3. Price: 250,- €

We would like to thank our premium sponsor SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) for the contribution of prize money and test videos recorded with SMI’s mobile eye tracking glasses (www.eyetracking-glasses.com).

We would also like to thank our sponsor Tobii Technologies for supporting the live demo workshop session and for the provided Tobii Glasses (http://www.tobii.com/en/eye-tracking-research/global/products/hardware/tobii-glasses-eye-tracker/) test videos.

Please Note: All challenge participants must register separately at http://saga.eyemovementresearch.com/challenge/register-for-the-saga-challenge/ for access to the challenge material and the video download.

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SAGA 2013 Workshop Organising Committee:

Workshop Organisers: Kai Essig, Thies Pfeiffer, Pia Knoeferle, Helge Ritter, Thomas Schack and Werner Schneider. All from Bielefeld University, Germany
Scientific Board: Thomas Schack, Helge Ritter and Werner Schneider
Jury of the Challenge: Kai Essig, Thies Pfeiffer, Pia Knoeferle and Denis Williams (Sensomotoric Instruments, SMI).

Please visit the website periodically for updates (http://saga.eyemovementresearch.com/about-saga/)
For additional question, please contact: saga@eyemovementresearch.com

We look forward to receiving your submissions and to welcoming you to Bielefeld in October, 2013!