Societally-Aware Autonomy: Games, Control, and Infrastructure for the Next Generation of Mobility Systems

Date: Sept 26, 2:15 – 3:05 pm

Abstract: Autonomous vehicles (AVs) offer unprecedented opportunities to reshape transportation systems by enabling fine-grained control, real-time adaptability, and proactive system-wide coordination. Yet, their integration into mixed-traffic environments presents fundamental challenges: how to model and anticipate the strategic behavior of human drivers, how to prevent the exploitation of cooperative AVs, and how to design scalable control policies that align individual incentives with societal goals.

This talk presents a series of interactive autonomy scenarios—spanning weaving ramps, network routing, and toll lane usage—to examine how AVs can be harnessed not just as isolated agents, but as population of societally-aware decision-makers that improve social traffic conditions. I will introduce game-theoretic models that capture the nuanced dynamics between AVs and human-driven vehicles and highlight control strategies that unlock AVs’ system-level potential while safeguarding against unintended consequences.

Together, these results illustrate how strategically deployed AVs, informed by behavioral modeling and infrastructure co-design, can enable more adaptive, efficient, and socially-aligned mobility systems.

Biographical Sketch: Ruolin Li is the Gabilan Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Southern California, where she leads the Societally-aware Interactive Autonomous Systems (SIAS) Lab.
Her research lies at the intersection of game theory, multi-agent systems, and optimization, focusing on the design and control of autonomous vehicles in mixed-autonomy transportation networks. She develops models and control strategies that leverage the strategic potential of AVs to improve traffic efficiency, coordination, and societal outcomes.

Prior to USC, she was a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University. She received her Ph.D.
and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley. Her work has been recognized with multiple honors, including the MIT Rising Stars in CEE and Stanford Rising Stars in Mechanical Engineering.

Location and Zoom link: LOV 307 and ZOOM Click Here