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Today Malin Svärd has defended her thesis "Computational driver behavior models for vehicle safety applications" and she has now received her doctoral title, as well as her title as SAFER doctor.

Malin Svärd has been an industrial doctoral student at Volvo Cars and the Division of Vehicle Safety, Department of Mechanics and Maritime Sciences at Chalmers University of Technology. Her research is about how to make mathematical models of car drivers’ behavior in different situations, both during everyday driving and during critical incidents. For example, she has developed models that can be integrated into the car's active safety system so that warnings can, in theory at least, be continuously adapted to the driver's behavior. She has also made models based on cognitive and neuroscience, where she has tried to model a driver's braking behavior in accident situations by mimicking the decision-making processes of the human brain. Malin’s work was connected to the SAFER associated project QUADRAE.

One of the most important results in her research is how to use a cognitive-based framework to create driver models and that these models can actually reproduce human reactions in real accidents. Malin has also shown how the framework can be usefully extended to take into account the direction the driver is looking at any given time. Another important contribution is that Malin has shown how it is possible to identify driver behavior in real time, without using computationally heavy machine learning methods.

The opponent at the dissertation was Professor Brett Fajen, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA. Malin’s supervisor has been Ass. Professor Jonas Bärgman and her examinator was Marco Dozza, both from Chalmers University of Technology.

We wish Malin all the best in the future!