Vehicle safety technology drives researcher’s project
Mention automotive testing and most people picture strapping a couple of crash-test dummies into a vehicle and slamming them into a wall.
But that’s just a tiny portion of the massive amount of research that goes into developing a car. Most of it is far more low-key, but just as important. It’s also done not just inhouse by automakers, but by independent researchers around the globe.
One of them is Birsen Donmez, an assistant professor of industrial engineering at the University of Toronto. Right now, she’s working on a program for Toyota to determine the best types of feedback: the lights, chimes and systems that warn you when danger is ahead.
“It was the type of research I was already doing when Toyota approached me,” Donmez explains. “They said they wanted to support traffic-safety research in North America and were looking for a Canadian partner. We mutually came up with a research project that has practical and scientific significance. We started in August 2012 with a contract for three years.”
Donmez, 33, is originally from Turkey, where she studied mechanical engineering.
“I was one of three female students in a class of 50 in my undergraduate program,” she says.
“I was good at analytical skills. My brother also went through an engineering program and I got exposed to the potential things that an engineer can do. The opportunities are basically boundless and that’s why I thought it would be a good career path for me.”
She moved to the U.S. to complete her schooling, where she also studied industrial engineering and statistics. Working with driver-behaviour research and vehicle technology design, she received her PhD at the University of Iowa before moving to Massachusetts to work as a post-doctoral associate at MIT.
“I did a similar type of research, but this time I focused on drones, which are driverless cars or airplanes. Even if they’re unmanned, there is a human operator to supervise the system, so even then, there was something for me to apply my skills.”
She’d never been to Canada, but when a position opened at U of T, she grabbed it.
“Faculty positions don’t come up very frequently and it happened at the right time,” she says.
“I came for the interview and was really impressed by the university and I moved here in 2010. I feel like I’m always going north — from Istanbul to Iowa to Boston and now here.”
She directs a lab at the university, leading researchers and students in the project. Using questionnaires and a driving simulator, and with information from on-road studies, she determines the types of vehicle feedback that provide the most benefit, while keeping their distraction to a minimum.
“There are some people who don’t respond to feedback and we go for the average that we see, unless it poses a danger for some drivers,” she says.
“At the worst case, you don’t see a benefit for someone, but you don’t see a decline in performance. You don’t want to endanger someone with the system.
“If you have a navigational display and you’re trying to find your way you have to look at your GPS, but you also need to pay attention to the road,” she says.
“We get people into these very controlled psychology experiments to assess who is better in these abilities than in others, and we put them in the simulator and see if there’s a dif- ference when they’re driving.” She finds her work especially fascinating because she sees it as an opportunity to make a difference. “It’s important to design technology that works for the human operator and that’s how I made the switch from pure mechanical engineering to this area,” she says. “Being from Turkey, it interested me because Turkey doesn’t have a very good traffic safety record. I thought I’ll actually get to learn about human behaviour, and do something about that as well. “What’s interesting is that, for some reason, my lab gets more female than male students. I only have one male student working on this for Toyota,” she notes.
“Females are under-represented in engineering in general and our department tried to recruit female faculty members to be role models. But I didn’t seek out female students. They came to me.” wheels@thestar.ca