What should an intelligent in-vehicle assistant (IVA) look like, and how should it behave to truly enhance the in-car experience? We present a large-scale video-based online experiment (n = 1238) exploring how IVA design factors influence user perceptions. Participants evaluated two scenarios (adjusting temperature, adjusting seat position) across 32 conditions varying in autonomy (user-initiated, system-initiated, autonomous with explanation, autonom- ous without explanation), embodiment (abstract virtual agent, humanlike virtual agent, abstract robot, humanoid robot), and conversational style (formal, informal). Contrary to prevailing academic trends, our findings reveal a clear preference against robotic embodiments and high levels of autonomy, sometimes even when explainable. Instead, participants favored proactivity with lower system autonomy and less anthropomorphic designs. We discuss how these insights challenge current design assumptions and offer concrete guidelines for shaping IVAs that align with driver expectations and comfort. This work contributes an empirically grounded understanding of IVA appearance, behavior, and communication style to inform future human-centered automotive interaction design.

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and are a powerful enabler for interactive systems. However, they still face challenges in long-term interactions that require adaptation towards the user as well as contextual knowledge and an understanding of the ever-changing environment. To overcome these challenges, holistic memory modeling is required to efficiently retrieve and store relevant information across sessions for accurate responses. Cognitive AI, which aims to simulate the human thought process in a computerized model, highlights interesting aspects, such as thoughts, memory mechanisms, and decision making, that can contribute towards improved memory modeling for LLMs. Inspired by these principles, we propose CAIM, a cognitive AI memory framework that models key aspects of human memory through a multi-agent architecture. Specialized LLM-based agents handle memory-related functions such as retrieval, contextual relevance evaluation, and memory maintenance. We compare CAIM against existing approaches, focusing on metrics such as retrieval accuracy, response correctness, and contextual coherence. The results demonstrate that CAIM outperforms baseline frameworks in different metrics, highlighting its context awareness and demonstrating its contribution to memory mechanisms for improving long-term human-AI interactions.

Driving can occupy a considerable part of our daily lives and is often associated with high levels of stress. Motivated by the effectiveness of controlled breathing, this work studies the potential use of breathing interventions while driving to help manage stress. In particular, we implemented and evaluated a closed-loop system that monitored the breathing rate of drivers in real-time and delivered either a conscious or an unconscious personalized acoustic breathing guide whenever needed. In a study with 24 participants, we observed that conscious interventions more effectively reduced the breathing rate but also increased the number of driving mistakes. We observed that prior driving experience as well as personality are significantly associated with the effect of the interventions, which highlights the importance of considering user profiles for in-car stress management interventions.

Several research projects have recently explored the use of physiological sensors such as electroencephalography (EEG) or electrooculography (EOG) to measure the engagement and vigilance of a user in context of car driving. However, these systems still suffer from limitations such as an absence of a socially acceptable form-factor and use of impractical, gel-based electrodes. We present AttentivU, a device using both EEG and EOG for real-time monitoring of physiological data. The device is designed as a socially acceptable pair of glasses and employs silver electrodes. It also supports real-time delivery of feedback in the form of an auditory signal via a bone conduction speaker embedded in the glasses. A detailed description of the hardware design and proof of concept prototype is provided, as well as preliminary data collected from 20 users performing a driving task in a simulator in order to evaluate the signal quality of the physiological data.

Driving in stressful and frustrating situations remains a common issue in daily traffic scenarios and has been shown to increase the risk for hazardous and aggressive driving style. Aiming to improve road safety with intelligent systems, frustration has to be detected continuously as well as robust and mitigation strategies must be applied effectively. Since both, the modeling of frustration over time as well as the design and timing of applications for frustration mitigation, are complex tasks, we divided this work in two parts: (1) A driving simulator experiment was conducted to collect a dataset and to validate a driving context related frustration induction method. With this dataset we developed a bimodal frustration detection for the driving context using a temporal support vector machine. The detection combines drivers' visual facial features with heart rate measurements and yields an accuracy of 88.7% (AUC of ROC). (2) We applied the real-time frustration detection in a second simulator study to evaluate two application scenarios for frustration mitigation, which include a frustration sensitive ambient light and an autonomous driving assistant. Both applications were examined for their frustration mitigating effect as well as in terms of user experience. The results provide a helpful basis to develop future intelligent frustration mitigation systems.