MA by Mohammad Mehdi Moniri advised by Sandro Castronovo and Christian Müller

This thesis investigates various modalities for referring to the outside environment from within a moving vehicle. A brief theoretical study is conducted to explore the different aspects of the vehicle context, regarding the role of the user and the speed of the car. Based on this study, following modalities were explored in order to create the reference set: Eye Gaze, Head Pose, Pointing Gesture, Camera View and the user's View Field. All of these modalities were implemented and tested in a moving vehicle in a real life traffic. Afterwards, using all of the named modalities, a data collection in the city Saarbrücken was conducted. During the data collection, the passenger used each modality to refer to the buildings in the city center. The driver was not involved in the data collection procedure. For analysis and visualization purposes 528 buildings of the city were modeled in 2.5D by using an airborne LIDAR scan of the city center, Google Earth, and a spatial database. Using this model it is possible to visualize the three dimensional interaction vector of the user in Google Earth.

MA

There is a significant amount of research focused on Cooperative Vehicles in projects like e.g. SimTD, PReVENT and SAFESPOT]. Cooperative Vehicles communicate via Wireless Ad Hoc Networks which are in this special case called Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks because of the high velocity with which the network participants move. Due to this high movement speed and the environment, which in an urban scenario consists of roads between buildings, the vehicles in the network frequently establish and loose connections. If a vehicle wants to, e.g. query information on the number of free spaces in a parking lot when it is not yet in direct transmission range with a road-side unit (short RSU) installed at the parking lot the packet needs to be sent via intermediate vehicles. The process of communcation via intermediate nodes, in this case vehicles, is called routing and the algorithm deciding, which of the neighbouring nodes should be forwarding the message is called a routing algorithm.

BA by Tanja Schneeberger advised by Angela Mahr and Prof. Wentura

The aim of this study was to analyze the reason for the Crossmodal Semantic Priming Effect. We repeatedly found crossmodal Semantic Priming Effects for spoken words in object classification in former visual search experiments. Results denote crossmodal influences of spoken words (colors, object labels) on visual detection and classification of target objects. Results clearly show facilitated responses in congruent trials.

MA by Veronika Dimitrova advised by Angela Mahr and Christian Müller

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) aim at providing safety and comfort to the driver and have become an integral part of our daily life. By designing such a system, a number of important aspects (such as understanding physical and cognitive demand of driving) should be considered, in order to provide the driver a reliable and trustworthy product. An important question for the development is also what kind of influence a system has on the driver, in the sense of his physiological state or, more precisely, whether differences in her/his stress level can be detected. Physiological measurements are a tool that helps answering this question.