HiACE Lab Presents and Receives Recognition at HFES 2025

Members of the Human-in-the-loop Advanced Cognitive Engineering (HiACE) Research Lab at Texas Tech University actively participated in the 69th Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) International Annual Meeting, held October 13–17, 2025, in Chicago, Illinois.

Ph.D. students Kaiser Hamid and Peihang Li, under the supervision of Dr. Nade Liang, presented their latest research on human–automation interaction and driver cognition:

• Kaiser Hamid: “A New Evaluation Metric for Takeover Maneuver Quality: Comparing Human Drivers with Autonomous Driving Agents.” His work introduces a new framework for quantifying takeover maneuver performance to better assess human–automation collaboration.

• Peihang Li: “Asymmetric Shifts in Risk Perception: Evaluating Driver Responses to Traffic Density Transitions.” His research examines how perceived risk changes dynamically with traffic conditions, offering insights for safer driver-assistance systems.

During the conference, Peihang Li also received the PPTG Student Research Grant from the Perception and Performance Technical Group of HFES. His funded project, “Risk Perception and Driver Adaptation in Dynamic Traffic Environments,” investigates how drivers adapt to changing traffic using simulator-based experiments and physiological measures such as eye-tracking and galvanic skin response.

The HiACE Lab team joined the Texas Tech HFES Chapter for a group dinner celebrating collaboration and research excellence.