I work as a Research Scientist at the Transportation Research Center Inc. where I conduct research related to vehicle safety, focused on Automated Driving Systems (ADS) and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS).

In the past, I have interned at Motional, where I developed automation solutions for mitigation analysis on vehicle safety issues; Oztech Inc., where I worked on risk assessment analysis for ADS; and Takeda Lab at Nagoya University, where I worked on creation of digital twins and reinforcement learning implementations for autonomous driving.

I received my Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Ohio State University, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2023. I worked under the supervision of Prof. Keith Redmill and Prof. Umit Ozguner and was part of the Control and Intelligent Transportation Lab. My research focused on proposing testing methods for evaluation of ADS, including adversarial behavior generation, formal methods and dynamic probabilistic risk assessment.

Previously, I received a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering and Control from Escuela Politecnica Nacional in Quito, Ecuador.

I was a Fulbright Fellow from 2017 to 2019, received the Presidential Fellowship at the Ohio State University for my dissertation year 2023.

Research

My research focuses on developing innovative risk assessment techniques for automated-driving assistance systems (ADAS) to identify potential system and environmental configurations that could lead to collisions and other vehicular hazards. I have published research encompassing a broad range of topics, including risk assessment, safety validation and verification of autonomous systems, computer vision, reinforcement learning, and control theory.

News

April 2024 Gave an invited talk titled “Model-based falsification and safety evaluation of autonomous systems” at the SIVALab Seminar Q1/Q2.

October 2023 Presented paper “On the Validation of Adversarial Threats to Cooperative Unmanned Aerial Systems for Search and Rescue Missions” at the IEEE International Automated Vehicle Validation Conference 2023 in Austin, Texas.

September 2023 Co-organized the 3rd Workshop on Safety Testing and Validation of Connected and Automated Vehicles at IEEE ITSC 2023 in Bilbao, Spain.

August 2023 Graduated from OSU and started my new job at the Transportation Research Center Inc..

June 2023 My work was covered as part of the CARMEN Project.

May 2023 Was invited to participate in a video produced by EducationUSA, where I shared my experiences as an international STEM student in the USA.

March 2023 Our chapter “Risk analysis for vehicle-pedestrian interaction with extended sensing” was published in the book Towards Human-Vehicle Harmonization.

April 2022 Our paper “A finite-sampling, operational domain specific, and provably unbiased connected and automated vehicle safety metric” was published in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

March 2022 Our paper “Data-Driven Risk-Sensitive Control for Personalized Lane Change Maneuvers” was published in IEEE Access.

November 2021 Presented paper “Model-Based Decomposition and Backtracking Framework for Probabilistic Risk Assessment in Automated Vehicle Systems” at the 2021 International Topical Meeting on Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Analysis (PSA 2021).

October 2021 Our paper “A formal characterization of black-box system safety performance with scenario sampling” was published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

October 2021 Our paper “Towards Guaranteed Safety Assurance of Automated Driving Systems With Scenario Sampling: An Invariant Set Perspective” was published in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles.

September 2021 Presented paper “Methodology for Hazard Identification and Mitigation Strategies Applied to an Overtaking Assistant ADAS” at the 2021 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference.

May 2021 Presented paper “A modeled approach for online adversarial test of operational vehicle safety” at the 2021 American Control Conference (ACC).

January 2021 Presented poster “A model-based validation framework for safety evaluation of autonomous systems” at the 2021 TRB Annual Meeting.

October 2020 Presented paper “Optical flow based visual potential field for autonomous driving” at the 2020 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV).

October 2020 Presented paper “Integrating deep reinforcement learning with model-based path planners for automated driving” at the 2020 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV).

August 2019 Started my Ph.D. at OSU!

Service and leadership

• STEM eMentor at TryEngineering powered by IEEE
• GUIDE Peer mentor at the OSU College of Engineering