FINAL PAPER READING: Estimating User’s Engagement from Eye-gaze Behaviors in Human-Agent Conversations

Estimating User’s Engagement from Eye-gaze Behaviors in Human-Agent Conversations
Yukiko, I. Nakano
Dept. of Computer and Information Science Seikei University
Ryo Ishii
NTT Cyber Space Laboratories
Intelligent User Interfaces

In this paper the authors discuss their work with eye gaze behaviors and their role in human-agent conversations. They essentially set up an entire room that allows the user to interact with a computer and perform actions using their eye movements. They also use this research to see how engaged in a conversation someone is and they try different strategies to keep the user interested and their eye gaze fixed. They did a few different kinds of experiences of experiments starting with the wizard of oz experiment and use this to see what they can do to keep eye engagement up. Later they would then use this data to create probing questions that would allow the user to keep their engagement up and their attention focused. They found that this kind of responsive feedback did help the user stay more focused and their attention stayed more fixed the longer it went. They even found that users asked more questions during the probing when they were more stimulated by the questions asked. They say that in the future they want to work on the algorithms for selecting questions for the user to be asked and they want to make the algorithm for picking probing questions more robust. They think that there is also other experiments that will help track user eye engagement. Overall they found that their experiment was a success and they plan to add these kinds of methods to personal computers.

This seems like a good experiment if they can scale it down. The image they give makes it seem like the whole room is the only want to be able to run experiments like this and if that's the case then they are going to have a hard time using it on a large scale. The experiment is a really good one: keeping peoples attention by asking probing questions. I like the fact that they are trying to keep the user engaged and asking questions while tracking their eye movements to read bio feedback. I like the idea of the system working to try to keep the user engaged is also a really neat concept and actually sounds like something that could later translate into a video game. It would be like the system would try to see how long it can keep your attention before you need to walk away...or something like that. Anway despite the article I wanted to say that I had a really good time in class and if you actually read this I deserve a 10 for this one because I haven't missed a single paper yet, but I digress. Thanks for a really good class and I hope that you all continue my capstone work and I get to see a paper on it soon.

Hooray for TAMU CHI.