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Obi Thompson Sargoni

Thesis Title: Exploring Human and Autonomous Vehicle Interactions at Autonomous Intersections through Agent-based Simulation

Supervisor: Dr Ed Manley
Second Supervisor: Dr Jack Stilgoe

Bio
Obi started his EPSRC funded PhD at UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) in October 2018 and is an Enrichment Student at the Turing Institute from January to October 2020. Before starting his PhD, Obi worked with geographical socio-economic datasets at the Open Data consultancy Oxford Consultants for Social Inclusion. He studied Physics for his Undergraduate and Masters at Imperial College London.

Research Summary
Obi's PhD attempts to develop Agent-based Models (ABMs) of pedestrian movement in urban environments that represent social interactions and negotiation between road users, in particular pedestrians and vehicles.

This work is inspired by findings in the urban design and sustainable transport literature that identify ways in which pedestrian behaviour and well-being are affected by direct and indirect interactions with vehicles.

The objective of this work is to use ABMs to describe the emergence of normative pedestrian behaviour (specifically walking on streets and crossing roads) resulting from interactions with vehicles and to explore the potential for behaviour change in the presence of autonomous vehicles (AVs). AVs are an new transport technology that some people claim will bring revolutionary changes to urban mobility. However, once introduced CAVs will interact with society to form a new ‘socio-technical’ system. Obi tries to use ABMs to generate a broader set of plausible future scenarios that account for behavioural change.

More generally, Obi's interests are in sustainable transport, how urban design influences behaviour, game theory, and reinforcement learning.