Long time-series, involving thousands or even millions of time steps, are common in many application domains but remain very difficult to explore interactively. Often the analytical task in such data is to identify specific patterns, but this is a very complex and computationally difficult problem and so focusing the search in order to only identify interesting patterns is a common solution. We propose an efficient method for exploring user-sketched patterns, incorporating the domain expert’s knowledge, in time series data through a shape grammar based approach. The shape grammar is extracted from the time series by considering the data as a combination of basic elementary shapes positioned across different am- plitudes. We represent these basic shapes using a ratio value, perform binning on ratio values and apply a symbolic approximation. Our proposed method for pattern matching is amplitude-, scale- and translation-invariant and, since the pattern search and pattern con- straint relaxation happen at the symbolic level, is very efficient permitting its use in a real-time/online system. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in a case study on stock market data although it is applicable to any numeric time series data.

Visual analytics of eye tracking data is a common tool for evaluation studies across diverse fields. In this position paper we propose a novel user-driven interactive data exploration tool for understanding the characteristics of eye gaze movements and the changes in these behaviours over time. Eye tracking experiments generate multidimensional scan path data with sequential information. Many mathematical methods in the past have analysed one or a few of the attributes of the scan path data and derived attributes such as Area of Interest (AoI), statistical measures, geometry, domain specific features etc. In our work we are interested in visual analytics of one of the derived attributes of sequential data-the: AoI and the sequences of visits to these AoIs over time. In the case of static stimuli, such as images, or dynamic stimuli, like videos, having predefined or fixed AoIs is not an efficient way of analysing scan path patterns. The AoI of a user over a stimulus may evolve over time and hence determining the AoIs dynamically through temporal clustering could be a better method for analysing the eye gaze patterns. In this work we primarily focus on the challenges in analysis and visualization of the temporal evolution of AoIs. This paper discusses the existing methods, their shortcomings and scope for improvement by adopting visual analytics methods for event-based temporal data to the analysis of eye tracking data.

Eye-tracking has become an invaluable tool for the analysis of working practices in many technological fields of activity. Typically studies focus on short tasks and use static expected areas of interest (AoI) in the display to explore subjects’ behaviour, making the analyst’s task quite straightforward. In long-duration studies, where the observations may last several hours over a complete work session, the AoIs may change over time in response to altering workload, emergencies or other variables making the analysis more difficult. This work puts forward a novel method to automatically identify spatial AoIs changing over time through a combination of clustering and cluster merging in the temporal domain. A visual analysis system based on the proposed methods is also presented. Finally, we illustrate our approach within the domain of air traffic control, a complex task sensitive to prevailing conditions over long durations, though it is applicable to other domains such as monitoring of complex systems. 

Eye-Tracking experiments have proven to be of great assistance in understanding human computer interaction across many fields. Most eye-tracking experiments are non-intrusive and so do not affect the behaviour of the subject. Such experiments usually last for just a few minutes and so the spatio- temporal data generated by the eye-tracker is quite easy to analyze using simple visualization techniques such as heat maps and animation. Eye tracking experiments in air traffic control, or maritime or driving simulators can, however, last for several hours and the analysis of such long duration data becomes much more complex. We have developed an analysis pipeline, where we identify visual spatial areas of attention over a user interface using clustering and hierarchical cluster merging techniques. We have tested this technique on eye tracking datasets generated by air traffic controllers working with Swedish air navigation services, where each eye tracking experiment lasted for ∼90 minutes. We found that our method is interactive and effective in identification of interesting patterns of visual attention that would have been very difficult to locate using manual analysis.

Eye tracking is used to analyze and compare user behaviour within numerous domains, but long duration eye tracking experiments across multiple users generate millions of eye gaze samples, making the data analysis process complex. Usually the samples are labelled into Areas of Interest (AoI) or Objects of Interest (OoI), where the AoI approach aims to understand how a user monitors different regions of a scene while OoI identification uncovers distinct objects in the scene that attract user attention. Using scalable clustering and cluster merging techniques that require minimal user input, we label AoIs across multiple users in long duration eye tracking experiments. Using the common AoI labels then allows direct comparison of the users as well as the use of such methods as Hidden Markov Models and Sequence mining to uncover common and distinct behaviour between the users which, until now, has been prohibitively difficult to achieve.