Hello world, I'm Linda.

Hello world,

My name is Linda, and I am a Swedish female living and working in Göteborg. I am a PhD student at Chalmers University of Technology. My topic is human factors of automated driving. In my work, I, together with my supervisors, try to understand how we humans behave after we have been exposed to different automated driving systems. For example, after a period of automated driving, can we safely drive manually again if the automated vehicle requests us to do so?

So how did I end up doing a PhD?

Many factors contributed to where I’m currently at:

First, I have people around me who have high academic degrees, such as a PhD or even a professor. I believe that this opened up my eyes to such opportunities, which I may not have been aware of otherwise. I always perceived people working with research to really enjoy what they did. That factor, specifically, made me open to pursue a PhD once I got the chance.

Then, the PhD position I currently have allow me to do many things that I enjoy. To begin with, I have an interest in human behavior. This interest has been with me since I was a little kid. I often reflect on different behaviors and try to understand where these behaviors stem from. Also, I have an interest in data analysis and data visualization. The exploration of a new data set thrills me: you never know exactly what you will find. Making nice visualizations also excites the creative side of me. During my engineering studies, I never explicitly studied data analysis. However, it was usually a part of many of the courses within the program. I was typically more interested in using data and math to solve problems than the course’s specific subject.

Finally, I wanted to work with something that I felt was meaningful to me and cared about. I found this in the area of human-machine interaction, which I got to know of through an elective course between my third and fourth year at Chalmers. This one course was followed by several other courses at the University of Waterloo: introductory psychology and cognitive ergonomics and at Chalmers: graphical interfaces, information visualization and prototyping in interaction design. However, two internships play an important role in combining my skills from Mechanical engineering and my interest in human-machine interaction. The first internship was at Volvo Cars (the transmission department). During my time there, I analyzed driver behavior using customer data. This work finally became my Master’s thesis (https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12380/254650). The second internship was at the Vehicle Safety division at Chalmers. I got the opportunity to analyze driver behavior in China using so-called naturalistic driving data. This work ended up in a scientific paper (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2019.12.023). In short, this is the story that led me into the current PhD position I have today. I believe that our work is meaningful since it aims to make automated vehicles safe. If my work can contribute to saving lives in traffic one day, I will be beyond grateful.

Thanks for reading,

Linda