Bio

Before joining the Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering in the fall of 2024, Renran Tian was an assistant professor at Purdue University in Indianapolis from 2018 to 2024.

Throughout his career, Tian has secured over $3.1 million in funding as the principal investigator from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Indiana Department of Transportation and various automotive industry sponsors. Additionally, he serves as a major co-PI for multiple projects, with total funding of approximately $4 million. Tian is a prolific author with over 60 peer-reviewed publications in journals, books and conference proceedings. He is the founding chair of the Technical Committee on Human-Centered AI in Transportation for the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society, where he organizes conference sessions, workshops and student competitions. Furthermore, he has served as an organizing committee member, associate editor and session chair for more than 30 international conferences. Tian is a member of HFES, IEEE, ACM, INFORMS, and IISE.

Area(s) of Expertise

Tian’s research spans Human-Centered Computing, Human-AI Interaction, Cognitive Psychology, Crowdsourcing and Automated Driving. At the intersection of cognitive ergonomics and artificial intelligence, Tian’s work aims to optimize interactions between humans and intelligent systems by leveraging cognitive principles and ergonomic design. His research involves developing adaptive systems that align with human cognitive processes to enhance usability and effectiveness, creating intelligent tools that support and enhance human decision-making and cognition, ensuring AI systems are designed with a focus on safety, user satisfaction, and long-term usability, and applying AI methods to model and simulate human cognitive behaviors.

Publications

• IEEE ITSS Technical Committee on Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence in Transportation [ITS Technical Committees] , IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Magazine (2026)
• Matching Explanation Detail to Scene Complexity: Studying Situational Awareness-Specific Feedback in Pedestrian Encounter Driving Scenarios , (2026)
• The Social Aptitude of AI: Quantifying and Assessing Driving Automation-Pedestrian Interactions , International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction (2026)
• VLMs Guided Interpretable Decision Making for Autonomous Driving ^* , (2026)
• Driver temporal segmentation of pedestrian crossing intentions during negotiations , Transportation Research Part F Traffic Psychology and Behaviour (2025)
• When Do They Cross? Temporal Dynamics of Pedestrian Intention Prediction and Crossing Actions , Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting (2025)
• A Unified Framework for Hierarchical Pedestrian Behavior Generation in Urban Scenario , HCI International 2024 – Late Breaking Papers. HCII 2024 (2024)
• Decouple Ego-View Motions for Predicting Pedestrian Trajectory and Intention , IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (2024)
• E-scooter Crash Data Analysis towards E-scooter Automatic Emergency Braking System Design and Validation for Automated Vehicles* , 2024 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV) (2024)
• Exploring Collective Theory of Mind on Pedestrian Behavioral Intentions , Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2024)

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