Iuliia (Yulia) Kotseruba

Traffic accidents involving vulnerable road users (VRUs) remain a challenge, especially in urban environments. I have contributed to a number of projects to 1) collect and analyze how pedestrians cross the streets, 2) to better understnad what influences their decision-making, and 3) to apply it to developing better predictive models for autonomous and assistive driving systems. Below are some relevant links:

• Two large-scale datasets (JAAD and PIE) and a benchmark for studying pedestrian crossing behavior.

• A series of papers analyzing pedestrian crossing behavior and social interaction with drivers.

• Models for predicting trajectory (PIEtraj) and crossing action (SF-GRU,PCPA).

• Cognitively-inspired simulation of pedestrian decision-making during crossing (paper).

I am interested in how people observe their surroundings, why, where, and when do they look, whether in traffic or when no specific task is given to them (aka free-viewing). Below are some of the relevant projects and links:

• A curated list of over 500 behavioral and practical papers (with code links) on how drivers observe the traffic scene.

• Models of drivers' attention and extended annotations for three largest datasets with driving footage and eye-tracking data: DR(eye)VE, BDD-A, and LBW (code and data).

• A benchmark for evaluating saliency algorithms on synthetic and natural images with odd-one-out (singleton) objects. The main finding of this work was that even very obvious salient targets are still missed by many saliency algorithms. We showed this both qualitatively and quantitatively, using a set of specialized metrics.

• A model for generating sequences of fixations for any image -- STAR-FC(C++) and pySTAR-FC (Python).

Cognitive architectures aim to explain human cognition by building software systems that mimic human behavior and biology. To inform my own work, I surveyed and analyzed over 3000 publications on 80+ congnitive architectures created in the last 40 years.

The findings were first presented in a survey of 40 Years of Cognitive Architectures. More recently, this work was extended to cover theory and practical issues in our new book on The Computational Evolution of Cognitive Architectures. Both are comprehensive sources that are meant as a reference for anyone interested in human-inspired AI.

Apply on the UoGuelph webpage and indicate my name as a potential supervisor in your application.

Fill the Google Form following this link https://forms.gle/ynMn1xFex4EXEnZs6. This will ensure that I will see your application. There is a chance that emails may end up in my spam folder because they come from outside of the university.

Scholarships. There are a number of graduate scholarships available from provincial and federal government, as well as from the private sector. Many of these are for domestic students, but opportunities also exist for international students.

Important dates for scholarships. I recommend planning your grad school application early to have the opportunity to receive additional funding.
December 1st: NSERC CGS-M MSc scholarship deadline. Students can apply in the year before starting (if they reach out to me in time).
Mid-October: NSERC PGS-D and CSG-D scholarships for PhD students.
Early February: provincial funding deadline. Usually, there is an internal dealine at UoGuelph for all of these scholarships, which is a few weeks earlier. Domestic students can apply either in the year before starting or after starting their degree.

Every term, I offer several positions for undergraduate students who want to pursue individual projects. This experience gives an opportunity to study in depth a particular topic and will be beneficial both for grad school and for jobs in the industry.

• One- or two-semester research project for course credit (CIS*4900/CIS*4910). You will work on a project throughout a term. The amount of work you put into the project depends on you, but expect to spend around 10 hours to make good progress. There is a lot of flexibility in terms of what students can work on: they can either help with ongoing projects in the lab or propose a project that interests them, projects can be engineering-focused (like building a piece of software to do something useful) or research-oriented (explore a new open-ended problem). Students who have taken at least 7 CIS credits are eligible. If you are interested, fill this form to express interest and I will reach out to schedule a short meeting to find the project that matches your skills and interests.
• NSERC Undergraduate Research Awards (USRA), Undergraduate Research Assistanships (URA), and International Student Undergraduate Research Assistantship (ISURA). Students will get an opportunity to engage in ongoing reserch in the lab or pursue an individual research project.
  These programs provide paid full-time summer research positions for domestic and international students. Openings are advertised on Experience Guelph in January. Applicants are interviewed and hired in February, and those hired are expected to work full-time from May to September.
• Volunteer. If you are not eligible for CIS*4900/4910 but want to gain research experience, you may join as a volunteer. Availability of the positions will depend on my time and ongoing projects. Please fill this form and indicate that you are interested in volunteering, I will reach out if there are opportunities.

Last update: December, 2025