Pnina Gershon Highlights AWARE Initiative at Distracted Driving Summit

This August, AgeLab research scientist Pnina Gershon attended the 13th Annual Distracted Driving Summit in Blacksburg, Virginia. The Summit brings together researchers, auto industry leaders, traffic safety professionals, educators, and law enforcement officials to discuss approaches to reducing distracted driving.

At the opening session of the Summit, “Safer Roads Through Driving Attention Technologies,” Gershon discussed the AgeLab’s ongoing work on driver monitoring, naturalistic driving, and the need for a more holistic understanding of the driving context that goes beyond simply detecting whether or not a driver is looking at the road. She was joined by fellow panelists JT Griffin from Seeing Machines, Alex Noble from Car, I am Digital (CARIAD), and Aimee Cox from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS).

Gershon also attended a second session focused on mental health and driving where she discussed the less visible distractions drivers contend with such as stress, emotions, or managing a neurodiverse condition. During her presentation, she emphasized that phones and screens are not the only things that can present distractions to drivers; instead, the internal world of the driver can also affect how they perceive and thus respond to the driving environment.

A broader theme emerging from these sessions is that understanding whether a driver is safe requires more than identifying a single behavior. The AgeLab’s AI with Awareness for Real-world Engagement initiative, or AWARE, aims rather to transcend this crude definition of distraction by studying the driver, their vehicle, and the driving context together. More broadly, research under the AWARE initiative investigates how the intelligent systems of tomorrow may support human decision-making, safety, health, productivity, and quality of life.

Read more about AWARE here.