UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Aiping Xiong, associate professor in the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), earned a five-year, $585,818 U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for a project titled “Enabling Human Situation Awareness across Physical and Cyber Spaces for Vehicle-to-Everything Communication Security and Driving Safety.”
Q: What do you want to understand or solve through this project?
Xiong: Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication is one of the key pillars upon which connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) rest. The ubiquitous connection with other road users and infrastructures in V2X can support safer and more efficient transportation. However, it can also raise security issues in which malicious actors can compromise the integrity of V2X communication that could mislead driving decisions and actions made by both autonomous vehicles and human drivers.
This project seeks to better understand the risks V2X attacks may pose to drivers' situation awareness — that is, their perception of elements in the situation, their comprehension of what is happening and their ability to respond to road hazards or autonomy failures — and to develop effective and easy-to-use tools with drivers to increase the situation awareness. This project will lead to advances in driving situation awareness across physical and cyber spaces, a critical topic given the growing deployment and commercialization of connected and automated vehicles in the real world.
Q: How will advances in this area impact society?
Xiong: The research activities will provide theoretical insights for understanding how drivers’ situation awareness adapts through integrating information from physical and cyber environments and how V2X communication and drivers collaborate to enhance security and driving safety. The findings of this project may help designers and developers optimize V2X communication design to improve driver-CAV interaction performance and enhance system resilience. Ultimately, the project outcomes could have a positive impact on the transportation industry by promoting the deployment of emerging technologies and improving driving safety and security by reducing traffic accidents and injuries in the long term.
Q: How will undergraduate and/or graduate students contribute to this research?
Xiong: The project aims to recruit five to 10 undergraduate students — one to two per year — from IST and beyond to participate in various research tasks. Graduate students will play a key role in all aspects of research, from conducting comprehensive evaluations to designing user-centered solutions. Both graduate and undergraduate students will have opportunities to collaborate with researchers from other disciplines and industries, as well as regions and cultures beyond Western societies. They will also engage in outreach activities, such as Penn State ENVISION workshops, to enhance participation of women and underrepresented minorities in security and privacy.
Q: The CAREER award recognizes your potential as a researcher, educator and leader in the field. How do you hope to fulfill that potential?
Xiong: This award is a critical step toward my long-term goal of developing an integrative framework of human information-processing in uncertain environments mediated by emerging technologies, thereby facilitating humans’ decision-making and action selection to adapt to the environments. The proposed research is at the intersection of cognitive psychology, human factors and security and privacy. Throughout this work, I will integrate my interdisciplinary research into education activities to inspire and train the future workforce in the areas of human factors of security and privacy.