Iuliia (Yulia) Kotseruba

Traffic accidents involving vulnerable road users (VRUs) remain a challenge, especially in urban environments. I have contributed to a number of projects to 1) collect and analyze how pedestrians cross the streets, 2) to better understnad what influences their decision-making, and 3) to apply it to developing better predictive models for autonomous and assistive driving systems. Below are some relevant links:

• Two large-scale datasets (JAAD and PIE) and a benchmark for studying pedestrian crossing behavior.

• A series of papers analyzing pedestrian crossing behavior and social interaction with drivers.

• Models for predicting trajectory (PIEtraj) and crossing action (SF-GRU,PCPA).

• Cognitively-inspired simulation of pedestrian decision-making during crossing (paper.

I am interested in how people observe their surroundings, why, where, and when do they look, whether in traffic or when no specific task is given to them (aka free-viewing). Below are some of the relevant projects and links:

• A curated list of over 500 behavioral and practical papers (with code links) on how drivers observe the traffic scene.

• Top-down models of drivers' attention and extended annotations for three largest datasets with driving footage and eye-tracking data: DR(eye)VE, BDD-A, and LBW (code and data).

• A benchmark for evaluating saliency algorithms on synthetic and natural images with odd-one-out (singleton) objects. Showed that even very obvious salient targets are still missed by many saliency algorithms, both qualitatively and quantitatively, using a set of specialized metrics.

• A model for generating sequences of fixations for any image -- STAR-FC(C++) and pySTAR-FC (Python).

Cognitive architectures aim to explain human cognition by building software systems that mimic human behavior and biology. To inform my own work, I surveyed and analyzed over 3000 publications on 80+ congnitive architectures created in the last 40 years.

The findings were first presented in a survey of 40 Years of Cognitive Architectures. More recently, this work was extended to cover theory and practical issues in our new book on The Computational Evolution of Cognitive Architectures. Both are comprehensive sources that are meant as a reference for anyone interested in human-inspired AI.

Apply on the UoGuelph webpage and indicate my name as a potential supervisor in your application.

Email me with your research interests (1 short paragraph), research experience (1 short paragraph), why you want to join my lab (1 paragraph), CV/resume, and unofficial transcripts.

Funding information. Full-time graduate students are guaranteed the following minimum funding per year: X CAD for MSc students and X CAD for PhD students. Portion of this funding is a teaching assistant salary. Graduate students also pay tuition, which amounts to approx. 9,000 CAD per year (note that this is for domestic students, see more detailed information here.).

Scholarships. There are a number of graduate scholarships available from provincial and federal government, as well as from the private sector. Many of these are for domestic students, but opportunities also exist for international students. I will work with students to apply for these additional funding sources.

Important dates for scholarships. I strongly recommend planning your grad school application early to have an opportunity to receive additional funding.
December 1st: NSERC CGS-M MSc scholarship deadline. Students can apply in the year before starting (if they reach out to me in time).
Mid-october: NSERC PGS-D and CSG-D scholarships for PhD students. The internal dealine at UoGuelph is a few weeks earlier. Students can apply either in the year before starting or after starting since PhD takes longer.

There are several opportunities to do research as an undergraduate. Having such experience will be especially beneficial to students who are thinking about applying to grad school.

• NSERC Undergraduate Research Awards (USRA), Undergraduate Research Assistanships (URA), and International Student Undergraduate Research Assistantship (ISURA). Students will get an opportunity to engage in ongoing reserch in the lab or pursue an individual research project, both with potential for publication.
  These programs provide paid full-time summer research positions for domestic and international students. Openings are advertised on Experience Guelph in January. Applicants are interviewed and hired in February, and those hired are expected to work full-time from May to September.
• One- or two-semester research project for course credit (CIS*4900, CIS*4910). The students will get experience with all stages of research, including writing a research proposal, conducting a literature review, designing an experiment, analyzing data, and presenting their findings in a publication-quality report.