Dr. rer. nat. Ralf Biedert  

Tobii AB

Short Bio

2016 - present, Tobii Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
  • roles: principal engineer
  • domains: XR, machine learning, SDKs
  • technologies: Rust, SIMD, WebAssembly, C#, Unity, TypeScript, SVMs
2013 - 2016, Tobii Dynavox, Stockholm, Sweden
  • roles: senior software engineer, product owner
  • domains: data analysis, assistive technologies, eye typing
  • technologies: TypeScript, C#, node.js, AWS, Redshift, Python, Processing.py
2011 - 2012, University of California, Berkeley, USA
  • invited by Dawn Song
  • roles: visiting scholar, guest lecturer
  • domains: biometric security, machine learning
  • technologies: Java, Android, Python
2009 - 2012, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Kaiserslautern, Germany
  • PhD, supervised by Andreas Dengel
  • roles: researcher, project lead
  • domains: artificial intelligence, human computer interaction, eye tracking, reading research, semantic web
  • technologies: Java, Python, JavaScript, OpenCV, libSVM, Weka, RDF
2006 - 2007, RICOH, Tokyo, Japan
  • internship at RICOH R&D labs
  • domains: image, gesture processing, machine learning
  • technologies: C++, Java, Python, OpenCV
2000 - 2008, Software Development Freelancer
  • role: software developer
  • customers & projects:
    • driver development for railway vehicles
    • GSM-R communication and message middleware
    • wireless security concepts
    • UI and web design
  • domains: drivers, middleware, security
  • technologies: C, C++, Java, Python, Win32, Linux, Qt, ACE
2009 - 2012, PhD, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany
  • Gaze-Based Human-Text Interaction — Text 2.0
  • final grade magna cum laude (1.0)
2001 - 2008, Diplom (B.Sc. + M.Sc.), University of Kaiserslautern, Germany
  • majored in computer science
  • minors in artificial intelligence and psychology
  • final grade very good (1.1)

Professional

Key Highlights
  • 20+ years experience in professional software engineering
  • 10+ years leadership experience (principal engineer, team lead, product owner)
  • 20+ publications & patents, 1000+ citations
  • 50+ international news reports about me and my work, over past 10 years
  • Track record across multiple domains (machine learning, HCI, XR, security)
  • International working experience (Japan, USA, Sweden, Germany)
10+ years professional experience
  • eye tracking
  • UIs & HCI
  • Web (everything from ASM.js to CSS animations)
  • Java (except JEE)
  • Python (data analysis)
  • machine learning (classifiers, clustering, SVNs, WEKA, ...)
5+ years professional experience
  • security & encryption (network intrusion, code vulnerabilities)
  • cloud architectures (in particular AWS)
  • C & C++ (I want those years of my life back ...)
  • C# (mostly Win32 + Unity development, a bit of Xamarin)
3+ years professional experience
  • XR
  • Unity
  • Rust️❤️
Talks
  • 'Research at Tobii', LANpercept network (Stockholm, 2014)
  • 'Life after a PhD' at Donders Discussions (Nijmegen, 2013)
  • Tobii Eye Tracking Academy Masterclass (Stockholm, 2013)
  • Tobii AB "Reading and Eye Tracking" (Stockholm, 2012)
  • Guest lecture CS 294-78: "Reading: Eye Tracking" (University of California, Berkeley, 2012)
  • Presentation 'Text 2.0' (University of California, Berkeley, 2012)
  • LEARNTEC "2020 - An Outlook" (19. International Trade Fair for Education, Learning and IT, 2011)
  • 2b.AHEAD Think Tank (9th Congress on Future Technologies 2020, 2010)
  • GESIS Mannheim (Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences, 2009)
Exhibitions & Fairs
  • CES (Las Vegas, '18)
  • GDC (San Francisco, '17)
  • CeBIT (Hannover, '08, '09, '10, '11)
  • Google Zeitgeist (London, '10)
  • VIP program Frankfurt Book Fair 2010
Installations
  • Text 2.0 - Augmented Reality (THESEUS Innovation Center, Berlin)
  • VIP program Frankfurt book fair (Frankfurt Book Fair 2010, Germany)
Awards
  • winner of the COGAIN Student Competition: Creative Gaze (2007)
Tobii AB
  • X-Team (XR & general research)
  • Statistics (big-data interaction statistics for HCI)
  • ERGO (ergonomics)
  • WPM-30 (eye typing f. disabled users)
UC Berkeley
  • Neuroblaze (biometric security & intrusion detection, researcher)
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence
  • Text 2.0
  • Perspecting (gaze & EEG, funded by Federal Ministry of Education and Research)
  • eyeEducator (education, funded by Stiftung Rheinland-Pfalz für Innovation)
  • myMory (context aware UIs, funded by Federal Ministry of Education and Research)
RICOH
  • MFP Enhancements (smart interfaces f. MFPs)
Freelancing
  • Vipco R&D (UI and security development)
  • CreativeRESULTS (various web)
Current
My Github Profile (I only casually develop these days and most things end up in private repos ...)
Rust
Rust Cheat Sheet
  • A (hopefully) handy guide to common syntax constructs.
FFSVM
  • libSVM model compatible
  • Highly optimized (~500ns for our models; 15x faster than libSVM)
  • Used for gaming and mobile VR
It has been a long time. All projects below are now abandoned / obsolete. Please do NOT send me any support requests anymore!
Web
gaze.io
  • eye tracking over web sockets in the browser
  • written in CoffeScript
  • modernized Text 2.0 framework
Text 2.0 Framework
  • use eye tracking in your web browser
  • supports handlers like onGazeOver, onFixation, ...
  • based on (now ancient) Applet technology
  • enables you to record interaction sessions for later analysis
Java
jCores
  • LINQ for Java (operator chaining + map / reduce similar to LINQ in C#)
  • provides many short-cuts to otherwise cumbersome Java operations
  • transparently makes use of all your CPUs
Processing Easy Eyetracker Plugin (PEEP)
  • made for media and digital artists
  • use eye tracking in Processing to create stunning gaze-responsive demos
Java Simple Plugin Framework
  • pain-free, XML-free plugins for Java

Academic

Current Research Interest
  • virtual reality
  • augmented reality
  • human computer interaction
  • human factors in security and privacy
  • gaze algorithms
  • eye tracking to improve system performance
For Students
Please send me a mail or apply through Tobii's Job Hub!
Other Researchers
Please send me a mail.
Note
If you are interested in working with me note that I am mostly involved in corporate research at the moment, so most of the good results will have to go unpublished ;)

2014

  • Ralf Biedert
    Gaze-Based Human-Text Interaction — Text 2.0
    Doctoral thesis, TU Kaiserslautern. Published with Verlag Dr. Hut.

2013

  • Jörn Hees, Mohamed Khamis, Ralf Biedert, Slim Abdennadher and Andreas Dengel
    Collecting Links between Entities Ranked by Human Association Strengths
    In 10th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2013)
  • Mario Frank, Ralf Biedert, Eugene Ma, Ivan Martinovic and Dawn Song
    Touchalytics: On the Applicability of Touchscreen Input as a Behavioral Biometric for Continuous Authentication
    IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (2013)
    Also best poster award at the Intel SCRUB retreat.

2012

  • Ralf Biedert, Mario Frank, Ivan Martinovic, Dawn Song
    Stimuli for Gaze Based Intrusion Detection
    6th International Symposium on Digital Forensics and Information Security (DFIS 2012)
  • Ralf Biedert, Georg Buscher, Andreas Dengel
    Gazing the Text for Fun and Profit
    In: Gaze Tracking in HCI, Y. Nakano (Ed.), Springer
  • Jörn Hees, Thomas Roth-Berghofer, Ralf Biedert, Benjamin Adrian, Andreas Dengel
    BetterRelations: Collecting Association Strengths for Linked Data Triples with a Game
    (Book chapter in preparation) In: Search Computing 2012, Springer
  • Ralf Biedert, Christoph Käding, Andreas Dengel
    Universal Eye-Tracking Based Text Cursor Warping
    Accepted for publication in the Seventh ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research & Applications (ETRA 2012)
  • Ralf Biedert, Georg Buscher, Arman Vartan, Andreas Dengel
    Reading and Estimating Gaze on Smart Phones
    Accepted for publication in the Seventh ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research & Applications (ETRA 2012)
  • Ralf Biedert, Mostafa El Hosseiny, Georg Buscher, Andreas Dengel
    Towards Robust Gaze-Based Objective Quality Measures for Text
    Accepted for publication in the Seventh ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research & Applications (ETRA 2012)
  • Ralf Biedert, Georg Buscher, Jörn Hees, Andreas Dengel
    A Robust Realtime Reading-Skimming Classifier
    Accepted for publication in the Seventh ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research & Applications (ETRA 2012)

2011

  • Georg Buscher, Andreas Dengel, Ralf Biedert, Ludger van Elst
    Attentive Documents: Eye Tracking as Implicit Feedback for Information Retrieval and Beyond.
    Accepted for publication in journal ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (ACM-TiiS), special issue on Eye Gaze in Intelligent Human Machine Interaction
  • Jörn Hees, Thomas Roth-Berghofer, Ralf Biedert, Benjamin Adrian, and Andreas Dengel
    BetterRelations: Detailed Evaluation of a Game to Rate Linked Data Triples
    In First International Workshop on Ordering and Reasoning held in conjunction with ISWC'11, 10th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2011)
  • Farida Ismail, Ralf Biedert, Andreas Dengel, Georg Buscher
    Emotional text tagging
    In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Eye Gaze in Intelligent Human Machine Interaction held in conjunction with IUI 2011.
  • Mostafa El Hosseiny, Ralf Biedert, Andreas Dengel, Georg Buscher
    The eyePad - Tom Riddle in the 21st century.
    In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Eye Gaze in Intelligent Human Machine Interaction held in conjunction with IUI 2011.

2010

  • Georg Buscher, Ralf Biedert, Daniel Heinesch, Andreas Dengel:
    Eye Tracking Analysis of Preferred Reading Regions on the Screen.
    In CHI '10 extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems. Atlanta, USA.
  • Georg Buscher, Ralf Biedert:
    Usability testing: affective interfaces.
    In journal "Informatik-Spektrum"
  • Manuel Möller, Patrick Ernst, Michael Sintek, Ralf Biedert, Andreas Dengel and Daniel Sonntag:
    Representing the International Classification of Diseases Version 10 in OWL
    In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development (KEOD), 25 – 28 October 2010, Valencia, Spain.
  • Ralf Biedert, Georg Buscher, Sven Schwarz, Manuel Möller, Andreas Dengel, Thomas Lottermann:
    The Text 2.0 Framework - Writing Web-Based Gaze-Controlled Realtime Applications Quickly and Easily
    In proceedings of the International Workshop on Eye Gaze in Intelligent Human Machine Interaction (EGIHMI) held in conjunction with IUI 2010.
  • Ralf Biedert, Georg Buscher, Sven Schwarz, Jörn Hees, Andreas Dengel:
    Text 2.0
    In CHI '10 extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems. Atlanta, USA.
  • Ralf Biedert, Georg Buscher, Andreas Dengel:
    The EyeBook - Using Eye Tracking to Enhance the Reading Experience
    In journal "Informatik-Spektrum"

2008

  • Ralf Biedert, Sven Schwarz:
    Designing a Context-Sensitive Dashboard for an Adaptive Knowledge Worker Assistant
    In Fifth International Workshop on Modelling and Reasoning in Context, Delft. Netherlands.
Tobii AB
  • Andreas Linnm - VR
  • Ludwig Sidenmarkm - VR
  • Yuchen Qium - VR
  • Xu Hani - Power Saving
  • Antonios Kouzoupisi - Tobii Statistics Infrastructure
  • Jonas Holgerssonb - Dyslexia visualization
  • Gigi Hom - Assistive calibrations
  • Philip Hammari - Software Testing Internship
  • Meng Sum - (in progress)
  • Germán Leivam - Gaze-supported pointing input devices for day-to-day computer interaction
  • Simon Cicekb - Gaze Assisted Ergonomics
  • Pelle Axelssonm - Text input rate enhancement for Tobii AAC products
  • Arthur Onoszkom - Text input rate enhancement for Tobii AAC products
UC Berkeley
  • Eugene Ma - Development & Evaluation
  • Arman Boehm - Development & Evaluation
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence
  • Mostafa El Hosseinyb,m
  • Mahmoud Sakrb
  • Christoph Kädingb
  • Robin Arnold
  • Lucal Lötterle
  • Florian Pelz
  • Thomas Litzelb
  • André Hoffmannb
  • Arman Vartand
  • Farida Ismailb
  • Mohamed Sharaf-El-Deenb
  • Nikhil Kapurp
  • Paritosh Aggarwalp
  • Parth M. Saxenap
  • Oxana Isaevai
  • Thomas Lottermanni
  • Julian Kallenbornd
  • Nathaniel Egwu
  • Eugen Massini
  • Roya Parvizii
  • Johannes Korzi
b) Bachelor's thesis
m) Master's thesis
d) Diploma thesis
p) Project thesis
i) Internship
Expert
  • Expert to the European Commission (H2020).
    • Reviewer
  • IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics (CYB-E 2015).
  • SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing (SIGCHI 2014).
  • ACM CCS Workshop on Security and Privacy in Smartphones and Mob. Dev. (CCS-SPSM 2013).
  • IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems (2013).
  • International Conference on HCI with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI 2013).
  • SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Work in Progress (SIGCHI-WiP 2013).
  • Seventh ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research & Applications (ETRA 2012).
  • 7th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (NordiCHI 2012)
  • TiiS, ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (2011).
  • International Conference on Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns, CAIP (2009).
  • ACM International Conference on Multimedia (2008).
    • Program Committee Member
  • Workshop on Pervasive Eye Tracking and Mobile Eye-Based Interaction (PETMEI 2013).
  • Eye-tracking and Natural Language Processing (ETNLP 2012).
  • Workshop on Pervasive Eye Tracking and Mobile Eye-Based Interaction (PETMEI 2012).
  • Workshop on Eye Gaze in Intelligent Human Machine Interaction: Eye Gaze and Multimodality.

    • Press about Me & My Work

    Online
    Online
    TV
    Radio
    Print
    Note: Some of the links above may have been outdated already.
    Emotional Text Tagging
    Various Interviews
    For Kids
    My Master's Thesis
    Note: Some of the links above may have been outdated already.