On Assessing Driver Awareness of Situational Criticalities: Multi-modal Bio-Sensing and Vision-Based Analysis, Evaluations, and Insights

Automobiles for our roadways are increasingly using advanced driver assistance systems. The adoption of such new technologies requires us to develop novel perception systems not only for accurately understanding the situational context of these vehicles, but also to infer the driver’s awareness in differentiating between safe and critical situations. This manuscript focuses on the specific problem of inferring driver awareness in the context of attention analysis and hazardous incident activity. Even after the development of wearable and compact multi-modal bio-sensing systems in recent years, their application in driver awareness context has been scarcely explored. The capability of simultaneously recording different kinds of bio-sensing data in addition to traditionally employed computer vision systems provides exciting opportunities to explore the limitations of these sensor modalities. In this work, we explore the applications of three different bio-sensing modalities namely electroencephalogram (EEG), photoplethysmogram (PPG) and galvanic skin response (GSR) along with a camera-based vision system in driver awareness context. We assess the information from these sensors independently and together using both signal processing- and deep learning-based tools. We show that our methods outperform previously reported studies to classify driver attention and detecting hazardous/non-hazardous situations for short time scales of two seconds. We use EEG and vision data for high resolution temporal classification (two seconds) while additionally also employing PPG and GSR over longer time periods. We evaluate our methods by collecting user data on twelve subjects for two real-world driving datasets among which one is publicly available (KITTI dataset) while the other was collected by us (LISA dataset) with the vehicle being driven in an autonomous mode. This work presents an exhaustive evaluation of multiple sensor modalities on two different datasets for attention monitoring and hazardous events classification.

Is Group-Awareness Context-Awareness?

This article discusses the interest of emerging a unified view for group awareness and context information on groupware and context-aware systems. Group awareness corresponds to an important concept on Groupware applications, allowing individual users to be kept aware of group's activities and status. Context is defined by ubiquitous computing as any relevant information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity. We assume that group awareness information should be considered as context information and handled as such. Group awareness information is often employed for decision making, contributing to users' activities and decisions, but it gives also an important clue about user's context, characterizing individual's actions regarding the group. As such, group awareness may be used for adaptation purposes, adapting the system behavior, the supplied content or its services. Besides, architectural concerns adopted on context-aware system should also be considered when developing new groupware applications that are more and more designed as context-aware systems.

Theorizing College Governance Across Epistemic Differences: Awareness Contexts of College Administrators and Faculty

To provide a fresh perspective on governance in Canada’s colleges, interview data from administrators and faculty were interpreted through the lens of Glaser and Strauss’ (1965) theoretical categories describing interaction between physicians and patients. An example of a “closed awareness context” is suggested around college fund-raising, while “mutual suspicion” was observed in administrator-faculty interaction around student success policy. Examples of “mutual pretense” include feigned administrator-faculty cooperation around changing college missions and faculty workload formulae. “Open awareness” or dialogue, however, occurred where professional bodies or unions intervened. Awareness contexts are central to symbolic interactionist research, which focusses on how everyday realities are constructed. Similarities between doctor-patient and administrator-faculty interactions can be seen in the examples here. For example, just as doctors feared that delivering bad news to patients might precipitate “mayhem” in the hospital, college administrators may fear that openness around divisive topics might precipitate “mayhem” in college management.