„How does the increasing levels of driving automation change social interaction in semi-automated road traffic, and how does the integration of sensor-driven media open up new possibilities to understand, design and evaluate such interactions? The unique focus of our approach is that interaction is viewed as a cooperative reality between all road users, cars, sensors, and their environments.“
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Co-Design Workshop on “Social Interaction in Semi-Automated Traffic”
by Shadan Sadeghian (University of Siegen) and Md Akib Shahriar Khan (University of Siegen)
Are you interested in sharing your experiences, ideas, and perspectives on communication and collaboration in evolving traffic systems? We seek participants for our user study on “Co-Design Workshop on Social Interaction in Semi-Automated Traffic”, led .
This Co-Design Workshop will explore how road users – pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, and others – interact in semi-automated traffic environments. Through creative and interactive activities, participants can share their experiences, ideas, and perspectives on communication and collaboration in evolving traffic systems.
Who can participate?
We welcome participants from all backgrounds – no prior knowledge or expertise is required, just a willingness to contribute your thoughts!
How to apply?
To appreciate your time and contributions, participants will receive a compensation of €40. Spots are limited, so please register as soon as possible using the following link: ➞ register here.
Selected participants will be contacted with further details.
About project P05
Project P05 – “Social Interaction in Semi-Automated Road Traffic” explores how increasing automation transforms social interactions in road traffic. By integrating multimodal sensing technologies, it examines prosocial behaviors, new communication methods, and human-machine cooperation in mixed traffic. Through field studies and simulations, the project aims to develop guidelines for safer and more inclusive automated mobility.
The project is led by Shadan Sadeghian. She is an assistant professor on Interactive Autonomous Systems at the University of Siegen.
Md Akib Shahriar Khanis a doctoral researcher in project P05 and in the Interactive Autonomous Systems group at the Universität Siegen.
“Historiographer: An Efficient Long Term Recording of Real Time Data on Wearable Microcontrollers”
by Michael Brilka und Kristof van Laerhoven (both University of Siegen)
Gathering data in the wild with wearables made easy. Michael Brilka and Kristof van Laerhoven published their open source Historiographer application for the Bangle.js 2 Smartwatch at Ubicomp’24 in Melbourne, Australia. Interested?
Data collection is a core principle in the scientific and medical environment. To record study participants in daily life situations, wearables can be used. These should be small enough to not disrupt the lifestyle of the participants, while delivering sensor data in an accurate and efficient way. This ensures a long recording time for these battery-powered devices. Current purchasable wearable devices, would lend themselves well for wearable studies. Simpler devices have many drawbacks: Low sampling rate, for energy efficiency and little support are some drawbacks. More advanced devices have a high-frequent sampling rate of sensor data. These, however, have a higher price and a limited support time.
Our work introduces an open-source app for cost-effective, high-frequent, and long-term recording of sensor data. We based the development on the Bangle.js 2, which is a prevalent open-source smartwatch. The code has been optimized for efficiency, using sensor-specific properties to store sensor data in a compressed, loss-less, and time-stamped form to the local NAND-storage. We show in our experiments that we have the ability to record PPG-data at 50 Hertz for at least half a day. With other configurations, we can record multiple sensors with a high-frequent update interval for a full day.
Ubicomp is a premier venue for presenting research in the design, development, deployment, evaluation and understanding of ubiquitous computing systems. Ubicomp is an interdisciplinary field of research and development that utilizes and integrates pervasive, wireless, embedded, wearable and/or mobile technologies to bridge the gaps between the digital and physical worlds. Ubicomp will bring together top researchers and practitioners who are interested in both the technical and applied aspects of Ubiquitous Computing technologies, systems and applications. The Ubicomp program features keynotes, technical paper and notes sessions, specialized workshops, live demonstrations, posters, video presentations, and a Doctoral Colloquium.
We offer a PhD research position in human-computer interaction (TVL 13, 100%, 4 years with potential extension) within our new sub-project, “Social Interaction in Semi-Automated Road Traffic”, led by Shadan Sadeghian and Kristof van Laerhoven.
You will be working on topics related to the design and evaluation of concepts for social interaction with automated vehicles. If you have experience in interaction design, human-computer interaction, Automotive User Interfaces, or other relevant fields and are keen to contribute to an interdisciplinary team, we warmly invite you to submit your applications. Deadline for applications is February 10.
For further information and details on how to apply, see here.
CRC granted funding for another four years
We are happy to announce the official start of the 3rd phase of our Collaborative Research Center Media of Cooperation. We warmly welcome all members!
We look forward to our final four years of collaborative research, intensive fieldwork, methods development, interdisciplinary cooperation, and final publications. In the coming years, we will once again advance our agenda to explore the relation between sensing & sense-making and the cooperative accomplishment of sensory media and develop our take on sensory praxeology. At the same we can draw on eight years of experience of working on cooperation and working cooperatively.
As the DFG puts it in their acceptance letter:
“The third funding period promises a rich harvest phase and at the same time marks a new beginning and perspectives for further research beyond the Collaborative Research Center.” (translation).
Executive Summary
Road traffic is a social situation involving the intensive intercommunication and interaction of road users. The behavior of drivers therefore affects not only themselves, but also other road users, such as drivers, cyclists, or pedestrians. With the increasing automation of driving and the delegation of driving tasks to vehicles, the interactions between road users will also see a fundamental transformation: These interactions will be generated cooperatively between vehicles, environments, road users, and the technologies and practices involved.
Due to the gradual automation of driving, roads in the near future will consist of a blend of non-automated, semi-automated, and highly automated vehicles with various sensor technologies and capabilities. Depending on the level of automation of the vehicles, the level of engagement of their respective drivers in communicating with other road users will vary. In other words: Humans will increasingly have to communicate with machines. This requires new forms of interaction between road users in mixed traffic situations (e.g. (non-)automated vehicles, pedestrians, or cyclists). In addition to the automation of driving, advances in in-vehicle and wearable sensor technologies have opened up the possibility of ad-hoc communication links between vehicles and other road users (vehicle-to-anything). For this reason, communication and interaction between automated vehicles and other road users through the use of new sensory technologies has increasingly become the focus of the field human computer interaction. However, the approaches developed so far are mainly concerned with the effectiveness of communication between road users (i.e. understanding and communicating intentions).
Less is known about the social consequences of such forms of interaction. Research has thus far failed to address the questions of how interaction can be accomplished in a cooperative and situated way, how it reconfigures the interplay between the human and the technical sensorium, and how its specific situatedness can also be considered in the confusing traffic situation “in the wild.”
This project therefore investigates how the increasing automation of driving is changing social interaction in road traffic and how the integration of sensory media opens up new possibilities for understanding, shaping, and assessing such interactions. We will investigate the integration of multimodal sensing, including in-vehicle sensors and wearables, in the design and assessment of highly automated traffic situations in the wild with different road users and a wide range of automation levels. How are traffic situations perceived by drivers, vehicles, and other road users, and how can sensors be used to shape the interaction and negotiation of complex traffic situations? The project focuses in particular on the heterogeneous evaluation criteria of interactions in road traffic and aims to identify behaviors in traffic that are perceived as “prosocial” and promote the well-being of all road users in order to achieve safe, harmonious traffic.
The proposed subproject is situated at the intersection of ubiquitous computing and human-machine interaction research and is pursuing its key project objective by means of a multi-level research design: Firstly, we will use data collected with multimodal sensor technology to identify elements that define behavior in mixed traffic scenarios as prosocial. In the process, we will use cooperation between human cognition and technical sensor technology at a methodological level. Secondly, we will explore new forms of communication between road users based on sensor technologies by identifying what information is needed in what situations and how technologies can be designed in an inclusive and accessible way. Third, the subproject will define interaction concepts for mediation and cooperation between humans and automated vehicles, including levels of a) communication between road users, b) assessment of the reliability of processed information, c) discrimination between cases of evasion and falsification, and d) compliance with individual and social norms and values. Finally, a test environment will be developed along with associated methods in order to investigate social interaction in heterogeneous traffic scenarios by employing quantitative and qualitative methods in a series of rigorous laboratory and field studies. Based on the previous results of the conducted studies, the subproject will ultimately provide a guideline for the development of interactive technologies for prosocial behavior in road traffic.
We use photo and video diary methods (Brandt et al., 2007) to collect scenarios of social traffic interactions from daily commuting.
The collected data are analyzed using qualitative methods such as grounded theory and emergent coding (Bryant & Charmaz, 2008) or a priori coding (Lazar, 2017).
The evaluation of our interaction concepts will mainly be done through simulation studies (Hock et al., 2018), and will be conducted using virtual reality and methods such as Wizard of Oz (Dow et al., 2005).
Both include qualitative and quantitative data collection methods.
WP2: Exploring the design space for technologies to improve social interaction in future traffic
WP3: Participatory co-design and development of concepts for social interaction in mixed traffic
WP4: Evaluation and validation
Timetable of the work program
Publications
2024
Michael Brilka and Kristof Van Laerhoven. 2024. Historiographer: An Efficient Long Term Recording of Real Time Data on Wearable Microcontrollers. In Companion of the 2024 on ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 934–938. https://doi.org/10.1145/3675094.3678484