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About

Eakta Jain’s research sits at the intersection of visual storytelling, human perception, and human-robot interaction, exploring how we see, interpret, and connect with both media and machines. Her work on viewer gaze in comic art (24 citations) reveals how artistic intention can be inferred from where readers look, offering a powerful tool for automatic video summarization and image cataloging. In virtual reality, she has made foundational contributions by benchmarking methods for generating 360° saliency maps from eye-tracking data (16 citations), directly impacting gaze prediction, rendering, and video compression. More recently, Jain has ventured into the novel territory of human-horse interaction to inform human-robot interaction (6 citations), asking how we establish working relationships with non-human partners. She has also investigated how subtle cues like pupil dilation in avatars affect perceived emotion (4 citations), pushing the boundaries of character animation. Her work is notable for bridging computational modeling with deep insights into human behavior, earning her recognition as a researcher who not only advances technical benchmarks but also reimagines the social and perceptual foundations of interaction.