New PhD in the SAFER community: Congratulations Xiaomi Yang!
We are proud to welcome a new PhD graduate to the SAFER community — Dr. Xiaomi Yang, who successfully defended her thesis on March 31, 2025, at Chalmers University of Technology.
Her thesis, titled “Improving Pre-Crash Safety Systems: Using Computational Driver Behavior Models and Efficient Sampling Methods”, presents cutting-edge research on how to improve the efficiency and realism of safety system evaluations, particularly for automated vehicles. Her work contributes valuable insights into virtual safety assessments and data-driven methods for enhancing conflict and crash avoidance technologies.
Xiaomi’s research has been conducted within the Vehicle Safety Division at the Department of Mechanics and Maritime Sciences, and she has been one of the Early-Stage Researchers in the Horizon 2020 project SHAPE-IT, an Innovative Training Network coordinated by Chalmers and connected to the SAFER partnership.
Key focus areas of her thesis include:
- Integration of computational driver behaviour models into pre-crash safety systems
- Active sampling techniques to efficiently generate test scenarios
- Bayesian methods to optimise human-in-the-loop data collection
- Behaviour-informed improvements to AEB (Autonomous Emergency Braking) systems
Opponent: Prof. Meng Wang, TU Dresden
- Chair & Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Jonas Bärgman, Chalmers University of Technology
- Co-supervisor: Prof. Carol Flannagan, University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI)
- Examiner: Prof. Marco Dozza, Chalmers University of Technology
Grading Committee
- Assoc. Prof. Charlie Klauer, Virginia Tech & VTTI
- Assoc. Prof. Arno Eichberger, TU Graz
- Assoc. Prof. Anna Anund, Linköping University & VTI
We wish Xiaomi all the best in her future career!
