Perceptual User Interfaces Logo
University of Stuttgart Logo

Biography

Ekta Sood was a PhD student in the Perceptual User Interfaces group from 2019 to 2024. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Cognitive Science from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Master's degree in Computational Linguistics from the University of Stuttgart. Her interests are in Multimodal modeling, Attention and Memory in Deep Learning, Affective Computing and Emotion Analysis, as well as Behavioral Neuroscience. Ekta was awarded a Google scholarship for the 2019/2020 year and did an internship at Meta (USA) in 2022-2023 as a Research Scientist Intern.


Teaching

2022
Machine Perception and Learning (Tutor)Master
2020
Machine Learning and Computer Vision for HCI (Fachpraktikum)Master
2019
Machine Learning and Computer Vision for HCI (Fachpraktikum)Master
 
Intelligent User Interfaces (Hauptseminar)Master

Supervision

2024
Analyzing Neural Attention in Chart Question Answering (M.Sc.) Yingpeng Ma§§
2023
Offline Resumption Detection in Reading (B.Sc.) Abel Gitzing+
2022
Video-based Representation Learning for Emotion Recognition (M.Sc.) Shangrui Nie**
 
Interpreting Neural Attention in NLP with Human Visual Attention (M.Sc. Research Project) Shangrui Nie**
 
Visual Question Answering through Attention Modelling with Curiosity-driven Reinforcement Learning (M.Sc.) Stoyan Dimitrov*
 
Get Into Their Heads: Disentangling Relevancy and Attention in Multimodal Transformers (M.Sc.) Fabian Koegel
 
Investigating Multi-modal Human-like Attention Integration for Visual Question Answering (M.Sc.) Ann-Sophia Mueller
2021
Calibration of an Eyetracker While Reading (Bachelor Research Project) Hallach et al.
 
Gaze to Text and Gaze to Image Generation (M.Sc.) Keerthana Jaganathan
 
Gaze Dataset Collection Study for Visually Grounded Language Modeling Tasks (InfoTech Project) Fabian Koegel
 
Image Reconstruction from Human Brain Activity by Variational Autoencoder and Adversarial Learning (M.Sc.) Mariia Podguzova**
2020
Fast-Learning System in Multi-Modal Context (M.Sc.) Adnen Abdessaied
 
Incorporating Gaze and Speech Signals in Multi-modal Emotion Recognition (B.Sc.) Ahmed Abdou
2019
Analyzing Human Gaze Information for Mental Image Synthetization (M.Sc.) Florian Strohm
*Co-supervised with Yao Wang
**Co-supervised with Florian Strohm
§§Co-supervised with Yao Wang and Susanne Hindennach
+Co-supervised with Francesca Zermiani and Chuhan Jiao

Publications

  1. InteRead: An Eye Tracking Dataset of Interrupted Reading

    InteRead: An Eye Tracking Dataset of Interrupted Reading

    Francesca Zermiani, Prajit Dhar, Ekta Sood, Fabian Kögel, Andreas Bulling, Maria Wirzberger

    Proc. 31st Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING), pp. 9154–9169, 2024.

    Abstract Links BibTeX Project

  1. Impact of Privacy Protection Methods of Lifelogs on Remembered Memories

    Impact of Privacy Protection Methods of Lifelogs on Remembered Memories

    Passant Elagroudy, Mohamed Khamis, Florian Mathis, Diana Irmscher, Ekta Sood, Andreas Bulling, Albrecht Schmidt

    Proc. ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), pp. 1–10, 2023.

    Abstract Links BibTeX Project

  2. Multimodal Integration of Human-Like Attention in Visual Question Answering

    Multimodal Integration of Human-Like Attention in Visual Question Answering

    Ekta Sood, Fabian Kögel, Philipp Müller, Dominike Thomas, Mihai Bâce, Andreas Bulling

    Proc. Workshop on Gaze Estimation and Prediction in the Wild (GAZE), CVPRW, pp. 2647–2657, 2023.

    Abstract Links BibTeX Project Tobii Sponsor Award, Oral Presentation

  3. Improving Neural Saliency Prediction with a Cognitive Model of Human Visual Attention

    Improving Neural Saliency Prediction with a Cognitive Model of Human Visual Attention

    Ekta Sood, Lei Shi, Matteo Bortoletto, Yao Wang, Philipp Müller, Andreas Bulling

    Proc. the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci), pp. 3639–3646, 2023.

    Abstract Links BibTeX Project

  4. Facial Composite Generation with Iterative Human Feedback

    Facial Composite Generation with Iterative Human Feedback

    Florian Strohm, Ekta Sood, Dominike Thomas, Mihai Bâce, Andreas Bulling

    Proc. The 1st Gaze Meets ML workshop, PMLR, pp. 165–183, 2023.

    Abstract Links BibTeX Project

  1. Video Language Co-Attention with Multimodal Fast-Learning Feature Fusion for VideoQA

    Video Language Co-Attention with Multimodal Fast-Learning Feature Fusion for VideoQA

    Adnen Abdessaied*, Ekta Sood*, Andreas Bulling

    Proc. of the 7th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (Repl4NLP), pp. 1–12, 2022.

    Abstract Links BibTeX Project

  2. Gaze-enhanced Crossmodal Embeddings for Emotion Recognition

    Gaze-enhanced Crossmodal Embeddings for Emotion Recognition

    Ahmed Abdou, Ekta Sood, Philipp Müller, Andreas Bulling

    Proc. International Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications (ETRA), pp. 1–18, 2022.

    Abstract Links BibTeX Project

  1. Neural Photofit: Gaze-based Mental Image Reconstruction

    Neural Photofit: Gaze-based Mental Image Reconstruction

    Florian Strohm, Ekta Sood, Sven Mayer, Philipp Müller, Mihai Bâce, Andreas Bulling

    Proc. IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pp. 245-254, 2021.

    Abstract Links BibTeX Project

  2. VQA-MHUG: A gaze dataset to study multimodal neural attention in VQA

    VQA-MHUG: A gaze dataset to study multimodal neural attention in VQA

    Ekta Sood, Fabian Kögel, Florian Strohm, Prajit Dhar, Andreas Bulling

    Proc. ACL SIGNLL Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL), pp. 27–43, 2021.

    Abstract Links BibTeX Project Oral Presentation

  1. Anticipating Averted Gaze in Dyadic Interactions

    Anticipating Averted Gaze in Dyadic Interactions

    Philipp Müller, Ekta Sood, Andreas Bulling

    Proc. ACM International Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications (ETRA), pp. 1-10, 2020.

    Abstract Links BibTeX Project

  2. Interpreting Attention Models with Human Visual Attention in Machine Reading Comprehension

    Interpreting Attention Models with Human Visual Attention in Machine Reading Comprehension

    Ekta Sood, Simon Tannert, Diego Frassinelli, Andreas Bulling, Ngoc Thang Vu

    Proc. ACL SIGNLL Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL), pp. 12-25, 2020.

    Abstract Links BibTeX Project

  3. Improving Natural Language Processing Tasks with Human Gaze-Guided Neural Attention

    Improving Natural Language Processing Tasks with Human Gaze-Guided Neural Attention

    Ekta Sood, Simon Tannert, Philipp Müller, Andreas Bulling

    Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), pp. 1–15, 2020.

    Abstract Links BibTeX Project

  1. Predicting Gaze Patterns: Text Saliency for Integration into Machine Learning Tasks

    Predicting Gaze Patterns: Text Saliency for Integration into Machine Learning Tasks

    Ekta Sood

    Proc. International Workshop on Computational Cognition (ComCo), pp. 1–2, 2019.

    Links BibTeX Project Best Poster Award

  1. Comparing Attention-Based Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Networks: Success and Limitations in Machine Reading Comprehension

    Comparing Attention-Based Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Networks: Success and Limitations in Machine Reading Comprehension

    Matthias Blohm, Glorianna Jagfeld, Ekta Sood, Xiang Yu, Ngoc Thang Vu

    Proc. ACL SIGNLL Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL), pp. 108–118, 2018.

    Abstract Links BibTeX Project