In June 2017, Ja Young Lee, PhD student in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, received the Honda Outstanding Student Paper Award at the International Driving Symposium on Human Factors in Driver Assessment, Training, and Vehicle Design, which was held in Manchester Village, Vermont. The symposium, also called the driving assessment conference, provides an interdisciplinary forum for scientific exchange on driving assessment tools, applications and technology.
Lee is advised by Emerson Electric Quality & Productivity Professor John Lee and works in the area of human factors and ergonomics. The award, sponsored by the American Honda Motor Company, provides a certificate and cash prize for outstanding research presented at the conference.
Based on experiments in the UW-Madison Driving Simulation Laboratory, Ja Young Lee presented a statistical model for a car driver’s glance behavior while engaged in a distracting task, such as text reading or text entry. The model evaluated the driver’s attention switching behavior as a function of the environment—uncertain road conditions—and specific task characteristics. Modeling the relationship between the nature of distracting tasks and the resulting driver behavior informs the design of advanced driver assistance systems that help reduce the risk of accidents.