Gearhead
This is a picture of the current version of a tutoring system being developed in a project in which I’m a late addition, taking over from George McConkie as he retires.
The goal is to monitor users’ cognitive and emotional states, using a variety of methods, speech recognition (at least of emotion and some key words), eye-tracking, and face recognition. It’s a really interesting project, a mixture of some things that are very impressive and some kind of odd gaps (particularly a lack of measurement of what children are actually learning), and it’s a typical Beckman project with people from electrical engineering, education, computer science, and psychology.
My main role involves the eye-tracking part and, unfortunately, also some of the integration of the whole effort. The eye-tracking system has been fairly limited, because the current system doesn’t really permit tracking of eye-movements in the two planes (the picture plane of the computer screen) and the horizontal plane where the gears are), so much useful information is missing. I met with a representative of the Swedish “Smart Eye” system that looks as though it could work very well with this set up, although I’m not sure that there’s equipment money around to get a new eye-tracking system at this point.