Yifan Li and Ruikun Luo win 2019 student HFES Awards - Industrial & Operations Engineering

PEOPLE:

PhD students, Yifan Li of U-M Industrial and Operations Engineering (IOE) and Ruikun Luo of Michigan Robotics, have both received annual awards from the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES).

Luo received the 2019 HFES Student Presenter Award, given to students who are authors of accepted papers or posters for the HFES Annual Meeting. His paper focuses on workload management in the teleoperation of unmanned vehicles. In their study, Luo and his collaborators proposed a Bayesian Inference model for assessing human’s workload via the human’s gaze trajectory and pupil size in real-time. In future work, they will incorporate the proposed workload assessment model into a real-time human autonomy system.

“I am honored to receive this student presenter award and very grateful for this recognition and the work of the award committee,” Luo said. “I am also thankful to all my collaborators and my advisor Jessie Yang for their hard work.”

Li received the 2019 HFES Student Travel Award, which is given to students in the first year of their graduate programs. At the Annual Meeting, he will present a paper that focuses on postural sway during simulated laparoscopic surgery under varying visual input.

“I am very excited to receive this award as it helps me to attend this conference and gives me a chance to share my research. I am looking forward to the opportunity to interact with leaders in my field and learn from them.”

Each awardee will be awarded $599 and complimentary registration to attend the 2019 Annual HFES Meeting in Seattle.

HFES is the world’s largest scientific association for human factors and ergonomics professionals. The organization has over 4,500 members and aims to promote and advance the discovery and exchange of knowledge concerning the characteristics of human beings that are applicable to the design of systems, products, tools and environments of all kinds.