đź’¬ About Me
I am currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the College of Transportation Engineering, Tongji University. I received my Ph.D. degree in Transportation Engineering from Tongji University in May 2025, with the thesis titled “Sociality-Aware Interactive Motion Planning for Autonomous Driving”.
From Nov. 2022 to Oct. 2023, I was a visiting scholar at the Technical University of Dresden (TU Dresden), Germany, under the supervision of Prof. Meng Wang.
I have published over 20 papers in top journals and conferences such as IEEE T-ITS, AA&P, and Scientific Data. I won the Champion of the 2022 CommonRoad Motion Planning Competition for Autonomous Vehicles and the Silver Medal at the 2023 International Exhibition of Inventions of Geneva. I was awarded the IEEE ITSS Initiative Project. Since 2024, I have served as a workshop chair, organizing and hosting the “Human-Machine Interaction” workshop at the IEEE ITSC International Conference.
Research Interests
- Interactive Motion Planning
- Modeling Social Driving Behaviors
- Human-Machine Interaction for Autonomous Driving
I am open to any interest on my work or collaborative research topics (zhaoxc@tongji.edu.cn).
🔥 News
- 2025.11 🔥  I organized and hosted a workshop on “From Interface to Intelligence: HMI 2.0 for Socially Compliant Autonomous Vehicles” at IEEE ITSC 2025 in Australia. [workshop site]
- 2025.07 🔥  Our work, “InterHub: A Naturalistic Trajectory Dataset with Dense Interaction for Autonomous Driving”, has been published in Scientific Data. [paper][dataset][code].
- 2025.05 🔥  I’ve defended my Ph.D. thesis on “Sociality-Aware Interactive Motion Planning for Autonomous Driving” at Tongji University.
- 2024.12  Excited to announce that our work, “InterHub: A Naturalistic Trajectory Dataset with Dense Interaction for Autonomous Driving”, is now available! Check out the [preprint paper], [dataset], and [code].
- 2024.07  I will be holding a workshop “Advanced Modeling, Evaluation, and Simulation of Interactions in Mixed Traffic” at ITSC 2024 during September 24- 27, 2024 in Edmonton, Canada.[workshop site]
- 2024.07  Our work “Towards Interactive Autonomous Vehicle Testing: Vehicle-Under-Test-Centered Traffic Simulation” has been accepted by IEEE ITSC 2024. My colleague Yiru Liu will be presenting this work at ITSC 2024 in Edmonton, Canada.[paper] [code]
- 2024.04  Our work “Measuring Sociality in Driving Interaction” has been published on IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. [paper]
- 2024.04  Our proposal “Evidence-Based Communication Channel for Autonomous Driving Technology” has been officially funded by the 2024 IEEE ITSS New Initiatives Program.
- 2024.01  We present our poster on “Modeling Social Interaction Behaviors and Measuring Driving Sociality in Strong Interactive Scenarios” at 2024 Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting.
- 2023.06  We present our paper on “Towards Active Motion Planning in Interactive Driving Scenarios: A Generic Utility Term of Interaction Activeness” at 2023 IEEE IV. [paper]
- 2023.05 Â We are awarded the golden prize on 2023 International Exhibition of Inventions of Geneva. [link]
- 2022.06 Â Our team won the championship of the Commonroad Motion Planning Competition for Autonomous Vehicles! [link] [talk]
🎓 Education
- 2025.09 - Present, Postdoctoral Researcher in Transportation Engineering, Tongji University.
- 2022.11 - 2023.11, Visiting Scholar, TU Dresden.
- 2020.09 - 2025.06, Ph.D. in Transportation Engineering, Tongji University.
- 2017.09 - 2020.06, M.S. in Vehicle Engineering, Jiangsu University - Tsinghua University (Joint).
- 2013.09 - 2017.06, B.S. in Vehicle Engineering, Jiangsu University.
đź“ť Selected Publications
InterHub: A Naturalistic Trajectory Dataset with Dense Interaction for Autonomous Driving
Xiyan Jiang, Xiaocong Zhao*, Yiru Liu, Zirui Li, Peng Hang, Lu Xiong, and Jian Sun
- A naturalistic driving dataset with dense interactions is extracted from multiple widely adopted public driving datasets, being unified, analyzed, and categorized to provide a user-friendly data foundation.
- A quantitative-yet-readable definition of the driving interaction using the formal method is proposed along with an open access toolkit.
Towards Interactive Autonomous Vehicle Testing: Vehicle-Under-Test-Centered Traffic Simulation
Yiru Liu, Xiaocong Zhao*, Jian Sun
- This study introduces an Vehicle-under-test-Centered environmental Dynamics Inference (VCDI) model for realistic, interactive, and diverse background traffic simulation.
Measuring Sociality in Driving Interaction
Xiaocong Zhao, Jian Sun*, Meng Wang
- We introduce a novel framework designed to analyze social behaviors through driving trajectories.
- By understanding and quantifying social patterns in natural driving interactions, we demonstrate the potential to enhance autonomous driving technologies by incorporating human strategies in expressing sociality.
Yiru Liu, Xiaocong Zhao, Ye Tian, et al.
Donghao Zhou, Zian Ma, Xiaocong Zhao, et al.
Xiaocong Zhao, Ren He, Jianqiang Wang*
🎖 Honors and Awards
- 2023 Silver Medal, International Exhibition of Inventions of Geneva.
- 2022 Champion, CommonRoad Motion Planning Competition for Autonomous Vehicles.
- 2022-2023 Graduate Student Fellowship of China Scholarship Council (CSC).
- 2021 Outstanding Graduate Student Scholarship of Tongji University.
- 2017 Grand Prize, China-Japan-Korea Innovation Engineering Competition.
- 2019, 2018, 2015 National Scholarship for College Students (Top 1%).
Services
Conference Organization
- Host, Youth Academic Frontier Forum, CSAE Xingzhi College (2025.12). Topic: Development and Application of Human-Machine Interaction Technology for Intelligent Driving.
- Organizer & Host, Workshop on “From Interface to Intelligence: HMI 2.0 for Socially Compliant Autonomous Vehicles”, IEEE ITSC 2025 (Australia).
- Organizer, Workshop on “Advanced Modeling, Evaluation, and Simulation of Interactions in Mixed Traffic”, IEEE ITSC 2024 (Canada).
Guest Editor
- Actuators (Special Issue), “Embodied Intelligence and Actuator Co-Design for Autonomous Vehicles”, 2025.
Project Leader
- Working group leader of 2024 IEEE ITSS New Initiatives Program “Evidence-Based Communication Channel for Autonomous Driving Technology”.
Reviewer
- IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems
- Transportation Research Part C
- Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering
- IET Intelligent Transport Systems
- Automotive Innovation
- etc.
Membership
- IEEE Member
- IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society Member