25 -- Real-Time Recognition of Automotive Driving Contexts

Sandia National Laboratories (Albuquerque, New Mexico) has developed technology to allow the recognition of physical driving contexts in real time. This technology consists of a computational cognitive model of the mechanisms whereby humans apply their knowledge and experience to interpret and identify contexts that occur during the operation of a vehicle, such as entering a high-speed roadway or approaching a slow-moving vehicle. This technology also consists of methods for automatically identifying driving contexts from unstructured and unlabeled vehicle and physiological data. Furthermore, context classifiers can be automatically tailored to the driving style of new users. In validation studies, this technology has shown itself to identify the correct driving context over 90% of the time, in both on-road and off-road conditions. This technology has been used to identify driving situations that were predetermined to be potentially dangerous. Also, this technology has been used to identify those situations that cause driving situations to become difficult. In the former case, a human provides exemplars of the potentially dangerous situations and the system learns to identify similar situations based on those exemplars. In the latter case, the system automatically determines the important situations from the driving data, and the human then indicates which situations are difficult. This is useful when it is not clear which driving contexts are important to identify in advance. Since this approach automatically determines contexts directly from data, the system can determine how the driving style of a particular user differs from other users, and the system can tailor its response accordingly. Both types of systems have shown themselves able to predict the human recognition of driving situations over 90% of the time. Sandia is making this Real-Time Recognition of Automotive Driving Contexts technology available to companies interested in partnering with Sandia to develop near-term and/or future applications via licensing or cooperative development agreements. Sandia will consider negotiating up to and including exclusive field of use licensing when business conditions are appropriate. For further information, please respond by mail, email or fax to Kevin Dixon by January 31st, 2006 at: Sandia National Laboratories, MS 1188, P.O. Box 5800, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87185-1188. Email: [email protected] Fax: (505) 845-9724. Please indicate the date and title of this CBD notice