PhD. in Electrical & Computer Engineering
Why did you choose graduate school at IUPUI?
The combined graduate program between Purdue University West Lafayette and IUPUI and the wide range of research opportunities on automotive safety were the two main reasons to pursue my PhD degree at IUPUI. Taking advantage of both Purdue and IUPUI gives me a great stage to show my talent and ambitions. Moreover, after receiving my Master’s degree here with Electrical and Computer Engineering, personal experience in how professional and valuable education within the IUPUI ECE department encouraged me to devote myself to research and academic courses.
What has been your favorite academic accomplishment since you’ve been here?
The research and project I have done are my favorite academic accomplishment since I have been here. I have fully passed the Qualifying Examination of Purdue ECE department last year and published over 8 conference papers on various interdisciplinary research topics in advanced control for complicated system, data collection and evaluation method for vehicle road departure detection system. I have also received the 29th IEEE Intelligent Vehicles (IV) Symposium Best Poster Paper Awards in June 2018. I am currently working on several more journal and conference papers regarding my research project and my own PhD dissertation.
What do you enjoy most about life in Indianapolis?
I have lived in Indianapolis for over 5 years. The second largest city in the Midwest offers affordable homes, work opportunities and great higher education, and much more! With a reasonable ratio of income and expense, Indianapolis is a perfect city that you can work toward your dreams with a relaxing living style.
Please provide some details about your work/research as a graduate student and/or any activities you are involved in.
I am now working as research assistant in Transportation Active Safety Institute (TASI) at IUPUI. My research topics are mainly focused on the modeling and control of complicated systems, computer vision and artificial intelligence algorithms. I am very interested in studying these areas and try to keep myself up-to-date with the latest frontier science and technology.
My current research topics and research projects are the development and evaluation of next generation of road departure detection systems (RDDS). Vehicle crashes due to road departure is a leading cause of fatalities on US highways. Roadside accidents and crashes account for about 35 percent of the fatalities on the nation’s highways. Road departure warnings and road keeping assistance (RKA) are the new active safety technologies for solving this problem. Most of the currently developed lane/road departure mitigation systems are based on the detection of clear lane markings. However, many roads do not have lane markings or do not have clear lane markings, especially in some rural and residential areas. Therefore, effective road departure detection and avoidance technologies for autonomous vehicle should rely on the detection and identification of different types of road edge and road boundary objects. Once we know better about the common features of roadside boundaries/objects in the US and the representative road departure pre-crash scenarios, the specific modeling and control strategies will be designed and applied to avoid accident due to run-off road events.