Profile

I live in Leeds with my wife, two kids (a girl of 10 and a boy of 6), and our bearded dragon Peachy. Originally we are from Sweden, where I worked as an engineer at Volvo (a car/truck company). We moved to the UK six years ago, when I got my job at the University – and we really like it here! If I was to do something else than research – maybe I’d make computer games? And I like playing games too – lately me and my kids have played a lot of Minecraft.

Here is me trying to do some online teaching – but Peachy wants to be a part of it too.

Think for a second about what you do when you want to walk across a road with cars. You look to both sides, and when you see that it is safe, you cross. But how exactly do you know that it is safe? If you think about it, it’s quite hard to tell! In some way, your brain uses the information it gets from your eyes, and turns that into a decision to start walking. My research is about trying to figure out how your brain allows you to do that sort of thing: Crossing a road, riding a bike, driving a car…

This can be helpful in some different ways: For example, if we can understand why humans sometimes make bad decisions in traffic, then we can use that to try and make roads and cars safer for everyone. And if we can understand how humans are able to drive or bike or walk even in very complicated situations, then we might use this to teach self-driving cars (robot cars) to do the same – because right now there is a lot they can’t do!

My specialty is to describe these kinds of behaviours using maths and computer programs. Just like a physicist might use maths and computer simulations to describe for example the movement of a planet in space, I use maths and simulations to describe human behaviour. Humans are a little harder to predict than space rocks though!

To collect information about how humans behave in traffic, I often use simulators. In Leeds we have some really nice simulators, for example this is our driving simulator (there’s a car inside that big golf ball):

and this is me testing out our pedestrian simulator (walking simulator):

The first thing I do at work is often to spend an hour or so reading. Being a scientist is a lot about keeping up with the latest stuff that other scientists have done, in my case for example some new cool maths describing human behaviour, so I can maybe put some of their maths in my own work.

Then I will probably have a few different meetings with PhD students or researchers that I work with. For example, we might discuss the results from our latest simulator experiment, or plan what to do next in our research.

One of the meetings might even be in a simulator, to test our next experiment. We carefully create different traffic situations that we are interested in, such that people can come to our simulators and experience those situations. And when they do, we can observe and measure exactly how they behave.

Then I will maybe have a couple of hours to myself, to think and do my maths, and program my little pretend humans in my computer. I will check if they behave like I have seen the real humans do in our simulators. Or I might write for a bit on a report describing my latest results, so that other researchers can read about it and use it in their work.

Finally, I will hurriedly try (and fail) to respond to all of the emails in my inbox, before I run off to pick up my kids from school.