SIAS Lab — Societally-aware Interactive Autonomous Systems
University of Southern CaliforniaUSC Viterbi School of Engineering

News

Build each other up.
Celebrate every step forward.

Research Funding

A $2M NSF FIRE award launches our next chapter in wildfire evacuation research

How can people, AI, and autonomous systems coordinate when every minute matters? With a four-year, $2M NSF FIRE award, Ruolin Li and co-PIs Costas Synolakis, Ketan Savla, and Yue Zhao are taking on that question through EVAC-AI. The project brings together agentic AI and multi-agent decision support for wildfire evacuation. We’re excited to begin this work together—and grateful for the support that makes it possible.

Explore EVAC-AI
Four team members gathered around a table with the EVAC-AI website on a screen behind them.
Best Paper

MAPLE receives BTR 2026 Western Track Best Paper Award

A proud moment for the MAPLE team! Our paper received the Western Track Best Paper Award at the 8th Bridging Transportation Researchers Conference. Led by Kexin Wang with Gavin Huang, Zehao Wang, Jiachen Li, and Ruolin Li, MAPLE connects vehicle-level incentives with network-level traffic goals. Congratulations to the whole team for turning a shared research question into award-winning work.

Read more
Research Funding

New NCST funding: fleet competition and the future of mixed-autonomy networks

How will competing companies operate fleets of autonomous and human-driven vehicles on shared roads—and what will that mean for transportation policy? NCST is supporting our project, “Strategic Interactions in Mixed-Autonomy Networks: Multi-Company AV/HV Fleet Operations and Policy Implications,” to explore these questions. We’re grateful to the National Center for Sustainable Transportation for supporting this work on the connections between fleet decisions, network outcomes, and policy.

Explore our research
Scholarship

Kexin Wang receives the 2026 ASCE Los Angeles YMF INWED Student Scholarship

A lovely milestone for Kexin and the lab: Kexin Wang, a PhD student advised by Ruolin Li, received the 2026 International Women in Engineering Day (INWED) Student Scholarship from the ASCE Los Angeles Younger Member Forum. We’re delighted to celebrate this recognition with her. Congratulations, Kexin!

Meet Kexin
Scholarship recipients displaying their certificates at the ASCE Los Angeles YMF INWED 2026 event.
PANEL · ACSIC SOFC

Finding our way in the AI era: a lively conversation across academia and industry

At ACSIC SOFC 2026, Ruolin hosted a panel on careers in academia and industry in the AI era with Zihan Wang (Abaka AI), Manling Li (Northwestern), Xuhai “Orson” Xu (Columbia), XuDong Wang (Physical Intelligence; incoming faculty at Duke), and Yubei Chen (UC Davis). A lively exchange of questions and perspectives—thank you to our panelists and everyone who joined the conversation!

About ACSIC SOFC 2026
Panelists in conversation on stage at the 2026 ACSIC Symposium on Frontiers in Computing.
PEOPLE · NEXT CHAPTER

Thank you, Gavin, and all the best for what’s next!

Gavin Huang wrapped up his undergraduate research at SIAS this May. As part of the MAPLE Best Paper project, he built and ran the traffic simulations that helped evaluate our coordination framework and measure its effects on congestion. Thank you, Gavin, for your contributions and for being part of the team. Wishing you all the best in your next chapter—keep in touch!

Three SIAS team members sharing a thumbs-up outside a campus building to mark Gavin’s next chapter.
INVITED TALK · UCLA

Ruolin gives a talk on societally-aware autonomy at UCLA

Ruolin visited UCLA to present “Societally-Aware Autonomy: Games, Control, and Infrastructure for the Next Generation of Mobility Systems,” sharing the questions behind SIAS’s work on connecting intelligent agents with better collective outcomes. The visit was hosted by Chen Tang, a longtime friend from their PhD days at UC Berkeley. Thank you, Chen, for the invitation, and Youngseo for co-hosting—a lovely visit.

Ruolin presenting her societally-aware autonomy talk to an audience at UCLA, with the talk title projected behind her.
CONFERENCE · POSTER

Fleet strategies, shared roads: our poster at ICCOPT 2025

How do fleet companies’ strategic choices shape the transportation networks we all share? At ICCOPT 2025, we presented our poster on traffic equilibrium in mixed-autonomy networks, connecting fleet operations with customer waiting and travel choices. This joint work by Jiaxin Hou, Kexin Wang, Ruolin Li, and Jong-Shi Pang brings company decisions and travelers’ experiences into the same picture. A happy moment to share the work—and be together at the poster!

Explore our research
Four collaborators gathered beside their mixed-autonomy traffic equilibrium poster at ICCOPT 2025.
NEW FACULTY · USC VITERBI

A new beginning at USC: Ruolin Li and the questions behind SIAS

Ruolin joined USC in 2024 with a question that continues to guide our lab: how can intelligent vehicles make decisions that benefit both individuals and the wider community? USC Viterbi’s feature, “Could Autonomous Vehicles Make Us More Altruistic?”, introduces her research on human behavior, autonomy, and transportation. It’s a warm introduction to the ideas we’re building on together at SIAS.

Read the USC Viterbi story