People’s transportation choices reflect complex trade-offs shaped by personal preferences, social norms, and technology acceptance. Predicting such behavior at scale is a critical challenge with major implications for urban planning and sustainable transport. Traditional methods use handcrafted assumptions and costly data collection, making them impractical for early-stage evaluations of new technologies or policies. We introduce Generative Traffic Agents (GTA) for simulating large-scale, context-sensitive transportation choices using LLM-powered, persona-based agents. GTA generates artificial populations from census-based sociodemographic data. It simulates activity schedules and mode choices, enabling scalable, human-like simulations without handcrafted rules. We evaluate GTA in Berlin-scale experiments, comparing simulation results against empirical data. While agents replicate patterns, such as modal split by socioeconomic status, they show systematic biases in trip length and mode preference. GTA offers new opportunities for modeling how future innovations, from bike lanes to transit apps, shape mobility decisions.

Touch data from mobile devices are collected at scale but reveal little about the interactions that produce them. While biomechanical simulations can illuminate motor control processes, they have not yet been developed for touch interactions. To close this gap, we propose a novel computational problem: synthesizing plausible motion directly from logs. Our key insight is a reinforcement learning-driven musculoskeletal forward simulation that generates biomechanically plausible motion sequences consistent with events recorded in touch logs. We achieve this by integrating a software emulator into a physics simulator, allowing biomechanical models to manipulate real applications in real-time. Log2Motion produces rich syntheses of user movements from touch logs, including estimates of motion, speed, accuracy, and effort. We assess the plausibility of generated movements by comparing against human data from a motion capture study and prior findings, and demonstrate Log2Motion in a large-scale dataset. Biomechanical motion synthesis provides a new way to understand log data, illuminating the ergonomics and motor control underlying touch interactions.

How do drivers perceive risk?Understanding what situations and factors cause drivers to perceive situations as critical can improve our understanding of road user behavior and inform automated driving technology.To investigate the factors that shape drivers' risk perception, we conducted an eye-tracking study with 27 participants who watched dashcam videos and continuously rated the perceived risk of various driving situations.Using the resulting dataset, we developed a computer vision-based machine learning approach that generates explainable predictions of perceived risk from video and eye-tracking data.Our SHAP analysis reveals that the proximity of objects and number of cars in a scene are the most significant contributors to perceived risk.Most interestingly, while people tend to sample similar objects in critical situations, their risk

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) emerges as a potential solution to urban congestion. However, as it lacks integration with existing transportation systems, methods to study its impact are necessary. Traditional empirical approaches are insufficient to study large-scale effects in this not-yet-real context. We developed UAM-SUMO, an extension of the SUMO simulation platform, to simulate the impact of UAM on public transportation, particularly how air taxis affect traffic flow and mode choices. We detail the modifications to SUMO and the UAM operation parameters. We open-source our code at https://github.com/M-Colley/uam-sumo and present a proof-of-concept data collection and analysis for Ingolstadt, Germany.

We review the state of open science and the perspectives on open data sharing within the automotive user research community. Openness and transparency are critical not only for judging the quality of empirical research, but also for accelerating scientific progress and promoting an inclusive scientific community. However, there is little documentation of these aspects within the automotive user research community. To address this, we report two studies that identify (1) community perspectives on motivators and barriers to data sharing, and (2) how openness and transparency have changed in papers published at AutomotiveUI over the past 5 years. We show that while open science is valued by the community and openness and transparency have improved, overall compliance is low. The most common barriers are legal constraints and confidentiality concerns. Although research published at AutomotiveUI relies more on quantitative methods than research published at CHI, openness and transparency are not as well established. Based on our findings, we provide suggestions for improving openness and transparency, arguing that the motivators for open science must outweigh the barriers. All supporting materials are freely available at: https://osf.io/zdpek/

In this review, we analyze the current state of the art of computational models for in-vehicle User Interface (UI) design. Driver distraction, often caused by drivers performing Non Driving Related Tasks (NDRTs), is a major contributor to vehicle crashes. Accordingly, in-vehicle User Interfaces (UIs) must be evaluated for their distraction potential. Computational models are a promising solution to automate this evaluation, but are not yet widely used, limiting their real-world impact. We systematically review the existing literature on computational models for NDRTs to analyze why current approaches have not yet found their way into practice. We found that while many models are intended for UI evaluation, they focus on small and isolated phenomena that are disconnected from the needs of automotive UI designers. In addition, very few approaches make predictions detailed enough to inform current design processes. Our analysis of the state of the art, the identified research gaps, and the formulated research potentials can guide researchers and practitioners toward computational models that improve the automotive User Interface (UI) design process.

To increase trust in systems, engineers strive to create explanations that are as accurate as possible. However, if the system’s accuracy is compromised, providing explanations for its incorrect behavior may inadvertently lead to misleading explanations. This concern is particularly pertinent when the correctness of the system is difficult for users to judge. In an online survey experiment with 162 participants, we analyze the impact of misleading explanations on users’ perceived and demonstrated trust in a system that performs a hardly assessable task in an unreliable manner. Participants who used a system that provided potentially misleading explanations rated their trust significantly higher than participants who saw the system’s prediction alone. They also aligned their initial prediction with the system’s prediction significantly more often. Our findings underscore the importance of exercising caution when generating explanations, especially in tasks that are inherently difficult to evaluate. The paper and supplementary materials are available at https://doi.org/10.17605/osf.io/azu72

User Experience (UX) professionals need to be able to analyze large amounts of usage data on their own to make evidence-based design decisions. However, the design process for In-Vehicle Information Systems (IVISs) lacks data-driven support and effective tools for visualizing and analyzing user interaction data. Therefore, we propose ICEBOAT1, an interactive visualization tool tailored to the needs of automotive UX experts to effectively and efficiently evaluate driver interactions with IVISs. ICEBOAT visualizes telematics data collected from production line vehicles, allowing UX experts to perform task-specific analyses. Following a mixed methods User-Centered Design (UCD) approach, we conducted an interview study (N=4) to extract the domain specific information and interaction needs of automotive UX experts and used a co-design approach (N=4) to develop an interactive analysis tool. Our evaluation (N=12) shows that ICEBOAT enables UX experts to efficiently generate knowledge that facilitates data-driven design decisions.

Research on cyclists‘ safety and comfort is a growing topic. Existing works address support systems with novel interaction concepts such as augmented reality but also the design and evaluation of high-fidelity bicycle simulators. Since the field is still in its exploratory phase, there have been few attempts to systematically provide guidance for conducting experiments. For example, there is no consensus on the choice of representative driving scenarios, the proper choice of different bicycle simulators, and measurement standards to systematically compare the results of different studies. With this workshop, we want the community to gather and discuss a roadmap for the future of HCI bicycle research so that these issues can be overcome.

Driver assistance systems are designed to increase comfort and safety by automating parts of the driving task. At the same time, modern in-vehicle information systems with large touchscreens provide the driver with numerous options for entertainment, information, or communication, and are a potential source of distraction. However, little is known about how driving automation affects how drivers interact with the center stack touchscreen, i.e., how drivers self-regulate their behavior in response to different levels of driving automation. To investigate this, we apply multilevel models to a real-world driving dataset consisting of 31,378 sequences. Our results show significant differences in drivers’ interaction and glance behavior in response to different levels of driving automation, vehicle speed, and road curvature. During automated driving, drivers perform more interactions per touchscreen sequence and increase the time spent looking at the center stack touchscreen. Specifically, at higher levels of driving automation (level 2), the mean glance duration toward the center stack touchscreen increases by 36% and the mean number of interactions per sequence increases by 17% compared to manual driving. Furthermore, partially automated driving has a strong impact on the use of more complex UI elements (e.g., maps) and touch gestures (e.g., multitouch). We also show that the effect of driving automation on drivers’ self-regulation is greater than that of vehicle speed and road curvature. The derived knowledge can inform the design and evaluation of touch-based infotainment systems and the development of context-aware driver monitoring systems.

With modern In-Vehicle Information Systems (IVISs) becoming more capable and complex than ever, their evaluation becomes increasingly difficult. The analysis of large amounts of user behavior data can help to cope with this complexity and can support UX experts in designing IVISs that serve customer needs and are safe to operate while driving. We, therefore, propose a Multi-level User Behavior Visualization Framework providing effective visualizations of user behavior data that is collected via telematics from production vehicles. Our approach visualizes user behavior data on three different levels: (1) The Task Level View aggregates event sequence data generated through touchscreen interactions to visualize user flows. (2) The Flow Level View allows comparing the individual flows based on a chosen metric. (3) The Sequence Level View provides detailed insights into touch interactions, glance, and driving behavior. Our case study proves that UX experts consider our approach a useful addition to their design process.

We are interested in the role of field user interaction data in the development of In-Vehicle Information System (IVIS), the potentials practitioners see in analyzing this data, the concerns they share, and how this compares to companies with digital products. We conducted interviews with 14 UX professionals, 8 from automotive and 6 from digital companies, and analyzed the results by emergent thematic coding. Our key findings indicate that implicit feedback through field user interaction data is currently not evident in the automotive UX development process. Most decisions regarding the design of IVIS are made based on personal preferences and the intuitions of stakeholders. However, the interviewees also indicated that user interaction data has the potential to lower the influence of guesswork and assumptions in the UX design process and can help to make the UX development lifecycle more evidence-based and user-centered.

Two-thirds of the people who buy a new car prefer to use a substitute instead of the built-in navigation system. However, for many applications, knowledge about a user's intended destination and route is crucial. For example, suggestions for available parking spots close to the destination can be made or ride-sharing opportunities along the route are facilitated. Our approach predicts probable destinations and routes of a vehicle, based on the most recent partial trajectory and additional contextual data. The approach follows a three-step procedure: First, a k-d tree-based space discretization is performed, mapping GPS locations to discrete regions. Secondly, a recurrent neural network is trained to predict the destination based on partial sequences of trajectories. The neural network produces destination scores, signifying the probability of each region being the destination. Finally, the routes to the most probable destinations are calculated. To evaluate the method, we compare multiple neural architectures and present the experimental results of the destination prediction. The experiments are based on two public datasets of non-personalized, timestamped GPS locations of taxi trips. The best performing models were able to predict the destination of a vehicle with a mean error of 1.3 km and 1.43 km respectively.