In Memory of Pınar Boyraz-Baykaş (1981–2020)

This book is dedicated to Professor Pınar Boyraz-Baykaş of Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, formerly at İstanbul Technical University, who departed us very young in 2020. It is offered as a tribute to her sustained contributions in digital signal processing for in-vehicle and transportation systems both as a contributing author, panelist, and as a coeditor in our book series. Her students, colleagues, and we –her friends– will be missing her smile and ready-to-help attitude whenever we needed one.

Pınar Boyraz-Baykaş was workshop coordinator and cochair at UT-Dallas for the 4th Biennial Workshop on “DSP for In-Vehicle Systems and Safety” in Dallas, TX, June 25–27, 2009. Her extensive work for this meeting, including session planning, event logistics, and support for keynote speakers, including Bruce Magladry, Director of the Office of Highway Safety, at US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), was significant with a lasting technical impact to the field. With unlimited energy, enthusiasm, and commitment to the community, she went on in her academic career to continue her technical contributions as well as inspiring and mentoring her students.

During her brief time with us, she has supervised or co-supervised more than 25 graduate students at İTÜ (Türkiye), University of Texas at Dallas (USA), Nagoya University (Japan), and Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden). She had contributed to eight books as contributing author or coeditor. She had published more than 40 journal articles or transaction papers in peer-reviewed conference proceedings. She had an excellent rapport with her students in and off the class. She always came to our meetings and workshops together with her students. She was the recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation fellowship and other fellowships and grants from both academia and governments.

Hüseyin Abut, Gerhard U. Schmidt, Kazuya Takeda, Jacob Lambert, John H.L. Hansen

September 2022

Preface

In recent years, the editorial group of scientists comprising H. Abut (lead editor), J.H.L. Hansen, G. Schmidt, and K. Takeda have had the opportunity to publish seven multiauthor edited books in the area of intelligent vehicles and transportation. The first five were published by Springer, and the last two by De Gruyter (2017 and 2020).

Each and every one of those seven books was based on high-quality papers or talks presented during eight biennial workshops called DSP for in-vehicle systems, safety, driver behavior, and infrastructure systems.

The first workshop was organized in 2003 (Nagoya, Japan), then continued in 2005 (Sesimbra, Portugal), 2007 (Istanbul, Türkiye), 2009 (Dallas, TX, USA), 2011 (Kiel, Germany), 2013 (Seoul, Korea), 2015 (San Francisco, CA, USA), and 2018 (Nagoya, Japan). World-class experts from academia and industry, covering a wide spectrum of automotive fields including in-vehicle signal processing and safety, participated in these workshops and shared cutting-edge studies on safety, driver behavior, infrastructure, and in-vehicle technologies.

Since the inception of the first workshop held in Nagoya in 2003, progress based on data analytics has completely changed the technologies of human–vehicle systems. At the time in 2003, the ability to achieve recognition of distant speech voice commands, deep learning for object detection, assessment of driver distraction/modeling, as well as fully autonomous driving had not been regarded as an industrial reality for at least 10 years. Now, with rapid advancements by a diverse range of researchers worldwide, these domains have not only scientific results but working implementations, and in some cases deployed operational systems as well. So, the next main challenge is the integration of these technologies toward more human-friendly systems, including balancing human versus autonomous machine-based vehicle operation, with the goal of harmonization of human–vehicle interactions.

During the past 2 years and counting, the world has been experiencing the Covid-19 pandemic, and it was not possible to hold a workshop to judge the potential chapters for the eighth volume in this series. We have observed that the global interest in this field has not diminished at all. On the contrary, there were many scientifically and technologically groundbreaking developments. Based on the feedback received and dialogues held, we the editors decided to undertake this new volume proposal by invitation. To broaden our expertise, we have invited the fifth co-editor Dr. Jacob Lambert of Nagoya University (Japan) to complement the existing expertise in the team.

This expanded editorial team has invited a large slate of colleagues to submit a book chapter proposal, to be considered as part of another high-quality book covering a wide spectrum of the automotive research field. To ensure quality...