ETRA

ETRA 2010 is the sixth biennial symposium in a series that has focused on all aspects of eye movement research across a wide range of disciplines. The goal of ETRA is to bring together computer scientists, engineers and behavioral scientists in support of a common vision of enhancing eye tracking research and applications. This year ETRA is being organized in conjunction with the European Communication by Gaze Interaction (http://www.cogain.org) research network that specializes in gaze-based interaction for the benefit of people with physical disabilities. To acknowledge this, the special theme of this year's symposium is Eye Tracking and Accessibility. Authors were also encouraged to submit papers including but not limited to the following areas: advances in eye tracking technology; visual attention and eye movement control; eye tracking applications; and eye tracking data analysis.

The symposium has grown to become the leading international conference in the area of research into eye tracking techniques and their applications. This year we have had more submissions than ever before from a greater number of countries. There were 58 long papers and 69 short papers submitted from 14 different countries (based on the first author only), which is the same number of countries, and almost the same list, as in 2008. We have kept the number of long papers in the conference the same as previously (18) giving an acceptance rate of 31%. This year we have rationalized the other categories of submission into just one, short papers. We have accepted 47 of these for inclusion in the conference (an acceptance rate of 68%).

The reviewing process has been improved by including 5 Area Chairs as a middle tier between the reviewers and the Program Chairs. All reviews were double-blind and all long papers were reviewed by at least 3 reviewers. All short papers which were not resubmissions of long papers were reviewed by at least 2 reviewers. Reviews of papers were prohibited from committee members where the review would present a conflict of interest. In addition the Area Chairs wrote meta-reviews of the individual reviews for each submission. 80 reviewers took part in the process and were assigned papers by the Program Chairs on the basis on their preferences and stated areas of expertise.