My research has focused on how eye movements can help us understand how people interact with computers and how eye movements can be used to interact with computers. I've participated in research projects on cognitive modeling, eye tracking, spatialized audio, and assistive technologies.
Computational cognitive models are computer programs that simulate aspects of people's perceptual, motor, and cognitive processes. Computational cognitive modeling is a very powerful methodology for capturing, asserting, recording, and replaying plausible sets of interaction among the processes at work during many human-computer interaction (HCI) tasks. The most important contribution of computational cognitive modeling to the field of HCI is that the models provide the science base that is needed for predictive interface analysis tools, such as CogTool. I have used computational modeling of visual search to investigate the effects of various factors, like text density and semantic grouping, on people's strategies. You can read more about this work by visiting the Cognitive Modeling and Eye Tracking (CMET) Lab page. Several of my publications on this topic can be found on my publications page. The culmination of this work can be found in my dissertation (pdf).
A recent line of research I've become involved in is investigating the use of auditory displays in complex tasks with multiple visual displays. You can read more about this on the project page. We currently have one publication (pdf) from this line of research reporting on how to transform the coordinates of an auditory display to facilitate identification on a visual display.
Two lines of research with which I've been involved use eye tracking as input to a computer. The first is EyeDraw, which uses eye tracking to help children with severe motor impairments express and develop their creative side. The second, EyeMusic, uses eye tracking as input to multimedia performance environment, Max/MSP/Jitter.
The analysis of eye movement data is integral to every research project I'm involved in. I've been a part of the CMET Lab since its inception in 2001 and the primary analyst of eye movement data for the research conducted in the CMET Lab. This analysis required the development of a series of custom software solutions for eye movement analysis that resulted in my ongoing development of a general tool for eye movement visualization and analysis, VizFix.