Workshop Overview

The Eighth International Workshop on Eye Movements in Programming (EMIP) will be held virtually on May 27th 2021. It is co-located with the 13th ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications (ETRA 2021).

The study of eye gaze data has great potential for research in computer programming, computing education, and software engineering practice. The Eighth International Workshop on Eye Movements in Programming (EMIP 2021) will again focus on advancing the methodological, theoretical, and applied aspects of eye movements in programming. The goal of the workshop is to further develop the methodology of using eye gaze tracking for programming, both theoretically and in applications. What can gaze behavior tell us about cognitive processes during programming? This question enables us to understand the role of human factors involved in programming.

Topics of Interest

We invite contributions analyzing gaze behavior of activities related to programming, such as code reading and debugging, social aspects, vision, and educational perspectives. These may include, but are not limited to, the role of emotions in programming, vision-based models, readability, and new theories of program comprehension. Contributions are expected to present implications to industrial programming practice or programming education. Specific topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Practical methods of using eye tracking
  • Identification and analysis of appropriate data abstractions
  • Models of cognition about software development
  • Effects of text-based, graphical, or diagram-based program representations
  • Effects of syntax or language features, as well as programming paradigms
  • Identification and analysis of behaviors and strategies of learners’ reading, writing, and debugging code, acquiring new domains and skills, longitudinal growth
  • Challenges for learners or software engineers (e.g., obstacles to learning or accomplishing tasks)
  • Applications for eye tracking, e.g., software engineering tasks, such as program comprehension, debugging, requirements traceability, change tracking
  • Development and evaluation of tools and processes for working with eye tracking
  • Development and evaluation of visualizations for static and dynamic program execution
  • Educational models on eye movements on programming
  • Applications offering programming assistance or accessibility using eye tracking devices, data, and analyses
  • Combinations of eye tracking with other sensing modalities, such as fMRI, EEG, or fNIRS
  • Multi-person eye tracking, e.g., during pair programming or collaborative problem solving
  • Eye gaze datasets and source code amenable to eye gaze studies
  • Analyses of pre-existing eye gaze datasets
  • Development of platforms, tools, and methods which enable reproducible experiments

Submissions and Presentations

One half of the workshop will be devoted to presenting new research results. The other will focus on facilitating discussion, teaching practical skills, and growing the community.

We invite short papers contributions (up to 4 pages, up to 8 pages, without references). Submissions must be written in English.

Please note that the correct submission format is single-column! This allows for up to 8 pages (+ references).

We will use ETRA’s PCS system for submission handling. To submit a paper, please visit: https://new.precisionconference.com/user/login?society=etra, select “Society: ETRA, Conference: ETRA2021, Track: ETRA 2021 Workshop – Eye Movements in Programming EMIP”. Your submission should be prepared following the ETRA template instructions.

Each submission will be reviewed by at least two members of the program committee. All accepted papers will be published in ETRA’s short paper proceedings in the ACM Digital Library. If a submission is accepted, at least one author of the paper is required to attend the workshop and (virtually) present the paper. We likely will use recorded presentations.

Important Dates

Deadline for papers: February 20th, 2021 February 27th, 2021 Notification to authors: March 15th, 2021

Camera-ready deadline: March 29th, 2021 Workshop: May 27th 2021, 3pm-6pm (CEST)

Accepted Papers

  • Salwa Aljehane, Bonita Sharif, Jonathan Maletic: Determining Differences in Reading Behavior Between Experts and Novices by Investigating Eye Movement on Source Code Constructs During a Bug Fixing Task
  • Teresa Busjahn, Sascha Tamm: Deeper Analysis of AOI Coverage in Code Reading
  • Hiroto Harada, Minoru Nakayama: Estimation of reading ability of program codes using features of eye movements
  • Ian McChesney, Raymond Bond: Eye Tracking Analysis of Code Layout, Crowding and Dyslexia – An Open Data Set
  • Naser Al Madi, Drew T Guarnera, Bonita Sharif, Jonathan Maletic: EMIP Toolkit: A Python Library for Customized Post-processing of the Eye Movements in Programming Dataset
  • Jonas Mucke, Marc Schwarzkopf, Janet Siegmund: REyeker: Remote Eye Tracker

Workshop Organizers

Program Committee

  • Teresa Busjahn, Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin
  • Martha Crosby, University of Hawaii
  • Fabian Deitelhoff, Fachhochschule Dortmund
  • Michael Dodd, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
  • Dror Feitelson, Hebrew University
  • Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc, École Polytechnique de Montréal
  • Martin Konôpka, Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies in Bratislava
  • Jonathan Maletic, Kent State University
  • Ian McChesney, Ulster University
  • Christian Newman, Rochester Institute of Technology
  • Unaizah Obaidellah, University of Malaya
  • James Paterson, Glasgow Caledonian University
  • Bonita Sharif, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
  • Jozef Tvarozek, Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava