The University of Florida Transportation Institute’s (UFTI) very own Deja Jackson took home Best Oral Presentation at the 2016 Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship Program (DDETFP) Transportation Research Showcase for her work titled “Today’s Perception of Vehicle Safety and Its Impact on Preparing for Tomorrow’s Autonomous Vehicles”. The award presented to her during the 95th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) in Washington, D.C. in January.
Jackson is a Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellow, which awards fellowships to undergraduate and graduate students pursuing degrees in transportation-related disciplines. The Transportation Research Showcase promotes the innovative research of these fellows. Participants presented their research in a panel format at the event, which addressed a broad array of significant transportation topics including congestion mitigation, infrastructure development and investment, safety, security, emerging green technologies, and logistics.
“I’m humbled and just so happy that people like what I’m doing,” she said. “It really shows that my research is going in the right direction.”
Jackson’s presentation focused around the preliminary research, development and commercialization of autonomous vehicles, including their potential to change transportation in regards to safety, mobility, energy, and the environment.
Jackson says that even though fully self-driving vehicles are getting closer to being realized people are hesitant about utilizing the technology in day-to-day life. Her research aims to identify the various perspectives of consumers, automakers, and engineers in terms of determining the “safety” of a vehicle and how this impacts the perception of their choice in vehicle. By using existing literature, new experiments can be designed to fill in gaps of information in the current research and lend a hand to future estimations of the impact of autonomous vehicles on improving traffic safety.
Jackson is a first year civil engineering doctoral student at the UFTI working under Dr. Sivaramakrishnan Srinivasan.
You can learn more about her in UFTI’s November 2015 Spotlight by clicking here.