Speaker
Professor Yingying (Jennifer) Chen
Stevens Institute of Technology, USA
Title
Sensing Vehicle Dynamics for Determining Driver Phone Use
Abstract
Distinguishing driver and passenger phone use is a building block for a variety of mobile applications. Its greatest promise lies in helping to reduce driver distraction. Cell phone distractions have been a factor in high-profile accidents and are associated with a large number of automobile accidents. This work utilizes smartphone sensing of vehicle dynamics to determine the driver phone use, which can facilitate many traffic safety applications. We explore a low-infrastructure approach that senses acceleration due to vehicle dynamics to decide phone position. Our system uses embedded sensors in smartphones, i.e., accelerometer and gyroscope, to capture differences in centripetal acceleration due to vehicle dynamics. These differences combined with angular speed can determine whether the phone is on the left or right side of the vehicle. Our approach involves low infrastructure and is flexible with different turn sizes and driving speeds. Extensive experiments conducted with two vehicles in two different cities demonstrate that our system is robust to real-road driving environments. Despite of the noisy sensor readings from smartphones, our approach can achieve a classification accuracy of over 90% with a few percent of false positive rate. We also find that by combining sensing results in a few turns, we can achieve better accuracy (e.g., 95%) with a lower false positive rate. Our recent study towards a completely infrastructure-free approach for driver phone use determination will also be discussed.
Speaker Biography
Yingying (Jennifer) Chen is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology. Her research interests include cyber security and privacy, wireless networks, mobile social networks and pervasive computing. She received her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Rutgers University. She has coauthored the book Securing Emerging Wireless Systems and published extensively in journal and conference papers. Prior to joining Stevens Institute of Technology, she was with Alcatel-Lucent. She received the IEEE Outstanding Contribution Award from IEEE New Jersey Coast Section each year 2005-2009. She is the recipient of the NSF CAREER award on wireless security and Google Research Award on mobile computing. She received Stevens Board of Trustees Award for Scholarly Excellence. She received New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame Innovators Award 2012. She is also the recipient of the Best Paper Award from ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom) 2011 and International Conference on Wireless On-demand Network Systems and Services (WONS) 2009, as well as the Best Technological Innovation Award from the International TinyOS Technology Exchange 2006. Her research has been reported by numerous media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, MIT Technology Review, Inside Science, Tonight Show with Jay Leno, NPR, and CNET.
Invited by: Professor Weihua Zhuang