The 2024 COGAIN Symposium

The 2024 Communication by Gaze Interaction (COGAIN) symposium is organized by the COGAIN Association and will be co-located with ETRA 2024, the ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research & Applications. COGAIN 2024 will take place at the University of Glasgow (in-person) on June 4, 2024.

The COGAIN Association is a network of excellence that integrates cutting-edge expertise on interface technologies for the benefit of users with and without disabilities. Through the integration of research activities such as this yearly symposium, the network aims to develop new technologies and systems, improve existing gaze-based interaction techniques, and facilitate the implementation of systems for everyday use.

COGAIN has a long history. Founded in 2008 on the back of the COGAIN project – a network of excellence supported by the European Commission’s Information Society Technologies (IST) 6th framework program that ran between 2004 and 2009 – the COGAIN Association aims to promote research and development in the field of gaze-based interaction in computer-aided communication and control.

By combining our efforts with ETRA, we hope to encourage a broader exchange of knowledge and experiences amongst eye tracking communities of researchers, developers, manufacturers, and users.

SPECIAL THEME: XR AND SPATIAL COMPUTING

As gaze is adopted as the main input modality of various eXtended Reality (XR) devices, this year’s COGAIN Symposium particularly encourages the submission of papers that explore eye-tracking, XR, and spatial computing technologies. This includes, but is not restricted to:

• New interaction techniques leveraging gaze
• Accessibility in and via XR
• Multimodal approaches using gaze
• New developments in eye-tracking technology for smart glasses
• New application areas for eye-tracking in XR and spatial computing

GENERAL TOPICS OF INTEREST

The COGAIN symposium is a yearly event that focuses on all aspects of gaze interaction related to eye-controlled assistive technology. Thanks to its strong identity, the symposium is the right venue to present advances in all areas mentioned below, which lead to new capabilities in gaze interaction, gaze-enhanced applications, gaze contingent devices, etc. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Eye tracking and eXtended reality (XR) – see our special theme above
• Eye-controlled assistive technology
• General gaze-controlled graphical user interfaces
• Eye-typing
• Gaze-enhanced games
• Gaze-controlled robots and vehicles
• Gaze interaction with mobile devices
• Gaze-controlled smart-home devices
• Gaze interfaces for wearable computing
• Gaze interaction in 3D (VEs, XR, and the real world)
• Usability and UX evaluation of gaze-based interfaces
• User context estimation from eye movements
• Interaction study of eye movements & pupillary responses
• Gaze-assisted multimodal interaction (gaze with e.g. multi-touch, mouse, gestures, head movement)

SUBMISSIONS AND PRESENTATIONS

The COGAIN symposium works as a half-day mini-conference, and authors have their submissions go through a double-blind review process managed by program chairs selected from the COGAIN Association. Selected authors are invited to present in-person, together with a keynote and panel sessions on current and future challenges of gaze-based interaction and eye tracking technologies.

We are looking for contributions that lead to interesting discussions. To that end, we encourage submissions from early academics and graduate students, from late-breaking work (under two pages) to traditional paper contributions (under eight pages) – in single-column format, not counting references. Regardless of the type of your submission, you will be given a chance to present your work as a talk.

Submissions should have a size that fits their contribution, be anonymized, and be submitted via PCS (Society: ETRA, Conference: ETRA 2024, Track: ETRA 2024 COGAIN) using the ACM article template. The timeline for this is as follows (all times are AoE):

• March 19: Paper submission deadline
• April 2: Notification of acceptance
• April 6: Camera-ready submission deadline

Accepted papers will be included in the ETRA Workshop Proceedings, and we require that at least one author per submission register for the symposium.