Our ACM CHI Conference 2026 paper, “Small Talk, Big Impact? LLM-based Conversational Agents to Mitigate Passive Fatigue in Conditional Automated Driving,” has received a CHI Best Paper Award.
This places it in the top 1% of submitted CHI papers, meaning it stood out to reviewers and committee members for its originality, rigour, and potential impacts. It represents the kind of forward-thinking, high-quality research that CHI seeks to recognise and celebrate.
Congratulations to Lewis Cockram, Yueteng Yu, Jorge Pardo, Xiaomeng Li, Andry Rakotonirainy, Jonny Kuo, Sébastien Demmel, Mike Lenné, and Ronald Schroeter.
This is an outcome of the QUT (Queensland University of Technology) & Seeing Machines Chair in Empathic Machines led by Ronald Schroeter and reflects the kind of work AVR3 is committed to: addressing critical human factors challenges in automated driving, especially those relevant to rural and remote driving, where long and monotonous journeys can increase the risk of passive fatigue.
Special congratulations to Lewis Cockram and Yueteng Yu as the lead authors.
The study was one of our most complex test track studies to date, involving many moving parts that had to align, several days of piloting, and 14 full days at the test track with 40 participants. As the behind-the-scenes photos show, this was a genuine team effort — with the broader PhD team working alongside our outstanding industry partner Seeing Machines and the highly supportive RACQ team at the Mt Cotton Mobility Centre.