PHD Students

Alice Bishop is a PhD student at Loughborough University in the Transport Safety Research Centre (TSRC). Alice’s PhD focuses on the communication from Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) to Powered Two Wheelers (PTWs). PTWs are an already overlooked vulnerable road user, combined with range of variable and unique behaviours, they prove a challenge to current assistive systems and future CAVs. A way to standardise interactions and behaviour between CAVs and PTWs is to ensure effective and safe indications of a CAV’s intentions to a PTW. The aim of Alice’s PhD is to assess current explicit and implicit indications of driver’s… [Read more]

Amy O’Dell is a PhD student at Loughborough University and the Transport Safety Research Centre (TSRC). Amy’s PhD explores the behaviour of distracted pedestrians among autonomous vehicles in mixed traffic environments. Amy will be systematically investigating pedestrian behaviour under different contexts, applying psychological models to everyday scenarios applicable for the introduction of AVs to provide a better understanding of how VRUs will interact with them. The long-term goal of Amy’s research is to build an evidence-base to inform future design guidelines of AVs and VRUs. Amy’s supervisors are Professor Andrew Morris and Dr Ashleigh Filtness. [Read more]

Caiyang’s main research area is the improvement of pedestrian safety in the automatic driving environment. As part of his research, Caiyang is looking at the Mobileye's RSS model, which is a rigorous mathematical model that guide the automated vehicle properly react to other vehicles on the road to ensure safety. It is necessary to calibrate and evaluate the RSS model before applying it in real driving environment; therefore, Caiyang is building the simulation scene for vehicle-pedestrian conflict, setting objective function and optimisation algorithm (to get the optimal model parameters) and evaluating the model’s effectiveness, robustness and reliability.   [Read more]

Elena Fratini is a PhD student at Loughborough University and the Transport Safety Research Centre (TSRC). Elena’s PhD aims to investigate how external human-computer interfaces (eHMIs) can be used to support the safe interaction between autonomous vehicles (AVs) and pedestrians in complex traffic environments. With the deployment of autonomous vehicles, the driver will no longer be available for communication, and so, alternative interaction approaches will be needed to replace existing forms of communication. Elena’s PhD is well placed, as there is a need for further research about the performance of eHMIs in more diverse traffic scenarios, with multiple traffic participants… [Read more]

Jorge is a PhD Candidate at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and the Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety – Queensland (CARRS-Q). Jorge’s PhD project aims to enhance the interaction between the human driver and an automated vehicle (AV) by exploring the concept of intention awareness. Specifically, this project investigates “when” intention awareness is needed and “what” triggered the need for it. To do this, Jorge collects multimodal data (e.g., accelerometers, cameras, and physiological sensors) from human-human driving interactions. In other words, driver-passenger interactions. The collected data brings the human-human interaction aspect, which will help train a human-centred machine… [Read more]

Michael Gerber is a PhD Scholar at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and the Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety – Queensland (CARRS-Q) under the supervision of Dr. Ronald Schroeter (primary), Prof. Andry Rakotonirainy and Prof. Daniel Johnson. The topic of his thesis is “Attention Management to Improve Fallback-Readiness in conditional automated vehicles” and explores automotive user interfaces and systems using Augmented Reality as a tool for attention management in SAE Level 3 (and higher). The aim of this research is to improve the fallback-readiness, especially Situation Awareness while the automated driving system is engaged (during the so-called non-driving related task). [Read more]

Mohammad Faramarzian is a student at Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety – Queensland (CARRS-Q) in Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Mo’s PhD research explores cooperative driving behaviour between drivers and passengers to inform the communication of intent between automated vehicles and humans. Mo’s research aims to take a human-centric approach on sharing of intent to support cooperative driving experience in automated vehicles. Mo’s supervisors are Associate professor Ronald Schroeter and Professor Andry Rakotonirainy.   [Read more]

Jiawen is a PhD student at the College of Transport Engineering at Tongji University. Jiawen’s research interests include the impact of human factors on helmet use and e-bike traffic crashes - an important issue in traffic safety analysis due to the increase in e-bike crashes. Jiawen and her colleagues have established an ordered logistic mediator model to obtain in-depth results and find out the influencing factors of helmet use and the number of delivery riders e-bike crashes. As well, Jiawen has conducted a city wide random online survey to explore e-bike use by 6,941 delivery riders in Shanghai. [Read more]

Weixuan’s main research interest is the traffic safety of two-wheelers. Two-wheelers are more difficult for autonomous vehicles to predict, due to the smaller size and unpredictable driving behaviours compared to motor vehicles. Weixuan’s study aims to calibrate and compare different autonomous braking algorithms under the safety-critical scenarios between two-wheelers and vehicles. Recently, Weixuan has conducted simulation tests of Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) algorithms and Automated Preventive Braking (APB) algorithm based on safety-critical events extracted from Shanghai Naturalistic Driving Study (SH-NDS). Therefore, her future study will involve further investigation and improvement of the algorithms and causal factor analysis of the safety-critical… [Read more]

Yongfeng is a master’s student at the College of Transport Engineering at Tongji University, under the supervision of Professor Xuesong Wang. His research interests include macro-level safety modelling, hot-zone identification and traffic safety management, all of which he is exploring through his masters. Yongfeng has a range of project experience and is currently working on the Guangzhou road traffic safety management plan. Yongfeng has published a TRB paper last year with Professor Xuesong Wang (Tongji University) and Professor Mohammed Quddus (Loughborough University). [Read more]