Getting the big picture from OEM finalist Toyota

Rini Sherony, Sr. Principal Engineer at Toyota Motor North America has been announced as a finalist for the “Most Engaging Content” category at the AutoSens Awards.  Nominated by a member of the AutoSens Detroit audience for the presentation delivered by Rini Sherony on their Collaborative Safety Research Center (CSRC).

The award for most engaging content is open to any individual or organisation who consistently produces outstanding, engaging, educational or informative content. The hotly contested category has a shortlist of 5 other individuals including Mentor Graphics, Andrew Macleod; videantis, Marco Jacobs; 2025AD, Stephan Giesler and EE Times, Junko Yoshida.

The AutoSens Awards are now in their second year. Alongside the ceremony itself, organisers provide an evening of entertainment at the iconic Atomium venue, a three-course dinner, science-themed comedy, table entertainment, and drinks freely flowing as the industry’s most accomplished figures mix with the new entrants looking to make a splash by winning an AutoSens Award for the first time.

“I am excited to be a finalist. I am more excited that I was able to share with attendees at AutoSens in Detroit, some of the valuable work that Toyota’s Collaborative Safety Research Center (CSRC) is working on to ensure safer transition to the future of mobility and attendees were appreciative of the content.” comments Rini. She continues “The focus of my presentation was Toyota CSRC’s work on safer transition to the future of mobility with a focus on deep learning projects to understand human behaviour and also driving environment. Both of these aspects are challenging for autonomous driving. In particular I think the human behaviour work was quite interesting and new to the attendees lot of whom are not involved in this aspect and did not think about the critically of human behaviour understanding for effectiveness of AV in real world driving.”

Rini Sherony is part of Toyota’s CSRC. They are focusing on many aspects of driving safety to ensure maintaining safety as auto industry is going through the most significant change due to introduction of different levels of autonomous driving. Among her current projects, are understanding human interaction in real world driving and environment recognition from a large scale naturalistic driving data analysis, conducting simulator studies to understand specific pedestrian/bicyclist interaction with systems like adaptive headlamp system, estimating benefit of different crash avoidance features as applied to real world crashes in terms of crash and injury reduction, application of deep learning in driving environment for object detection, etc.

“Rini’s presentation content was highlighted by the AutoSens community as setting the standard for communication of technical information in an engaging and effective manner”, said Robert Stead, “CSRC’s work covers human behaviour, and communicating about the benefits and challenges of ADAS and autonomy is a key part of that.”

“Winning an AutoSens award will be highly meaningful to me because to me that means I was able to show the attendees the importance of Toyota CSRC projects and the positive impact they can have for enhancing road safety in US.” comments Sherony. “I would be thrilled to win this award since all nominees are well deserving. But the uniqueness I brought among all the nominees was that I was the only auto OEM nominated. As an OEM we are bringing the end product to the customer. So we have to evaluate all aspects of driving and making sure it is safe, it is an immense sense of responsibility. For that we need to evaluate the entire driving conditions, not just a small aspect of it and my presentation showed the big picture, potential issues from the human aspect that others may not be aware of. Me winning this award will bring this to a larger audience and also emphasize the importance of this research.”


Congratulations again to Rini Sherony, and good luck! Join the celebrations at the AutoSens Awards and see who will be crowned the winner of the “Most Engaging Content” category on 19 September at the Atomium, Brussels. Book tickets here >>

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