Doctoral Thesis Defense of Fares Abawi

16 December 2024

On 16.12.2024, our colleague Fares Abawi had the successful defense of his doctoral thesis "Multimodal Social Cue Integration for Attention Modeling and Robot Gaze Control". We congratulate him for his graduation and wishing the best for his future career! Here is the abstract of his thesis:

Social cues influence our attention leading to shifts in our gaze. In this thesis, we integrate non-verbal head-related social cues such as gaze direction, facial expressions, and localized sound into saliency models. We deploy these models on robots, enabling gaze control during social interactions. Using neural early fusion and late integration, we enhance audiovisual saliency prediction models. We then extend these models to predict personalized scanpath patterns. Finally, we introduce a distributed framework for deploying and evaluating our models on robotic platforms, allowing us to design robots with humanlike gaze for conducting human-robot interaction studies and cognitive robotic simulations.

Here are some highlight publications that arose during his doctorate:

Unified Dynamic Scanpath Predictors Outperform Individually Trained Neural Models

Wrapyfi: A Python Wrapper for Integrating Robots, Sensors, and Applications across Multiple Middleware

GASP: Gated Attention for Saliency Prediction