
Ruolin Li will be launching a new course in Spring 2025: CE599, Game Theory for Interactive Autonomy
There’s a rite of passage shared by all those who move to Los Angeles. The initiation into the scope of the city’s sprawl; distances measured not in miles but by the erratic rhythms of traffic. Soon enough, we learn the difference between the expected duration of a journey (helpfully backed by navigation app of choice) – and how long it actually takes.
For Ruolin Li, Gabilan Assistant Professor in the Sonny Astani Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering (CEE), that rite of passage was particularly memorable.
Growing up in the city of Changchun in Northeast China, she learned to drive at the first opportunity. When she relocated to the U.S. to pursue graduate studies in mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley, driving was once again a necessity – and when she won her assistant professorship at CEE, she made the pilgrimage along the coast by car.
So, after spending an afternoon at the Getty Center in West LA, it seemed a fairly feasibly trip to travel east across the city for dinner in Monterey Park – a neighborhood credited with transforming the Chinese American experience (and recognized as the city’s go-to for authentic Chinese food).

For Ruolin Li, Gabilan Assistant Professor in the Sonny Astani Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering
“The journey was supposed to take 30 minutes,” Li recalls. “But it ended up taking two and a half hours. Drivers were weaving in and out of 8 lanes of traffic to try and optimize their route, and it was exhausting to keep up. I kept thinking – if I was in an autonomous vehicle, I could be spending that time and energy doing something more enjoyable and productive, like reading a book or facetiming with family and friends.”
For Li, driving – and being stuck in traffic – is a form of research. She specializes in the design and control of future mobility systems, with a focus on automated agents such as self-driving cars.
Her research brings together elements of game theory, multi-agent systems, control and optimization, and machine learning, and she’s learned that there’s something intrinsically motivating in the process of working across disciplines. “I truly appreciate the beauty of this area of research,” she reflects. “The math, the technology, the engineering – it’s magnificent.”
At the same time, her perspective is inherently humanistic. “To implement successful intelligent transport systems at this stage, you have to understand human behavior,” she says. “Responses to these autonomous cars can be complex. Without a systematic consideration of human motivation and psychology, we’re not yet fully prepared for the introduction of fleets of AVs on our roads. More research needs to be conducted into how this new technology can strike a balance between individual human interests and the good of society.”
Li speaks as someone attuned to the tendencies of opportunistic drivers keen to reach their destination as soon as possible. “When driving depends on our own decisions, we might break the speed limit, or drop into the queue, or generally act according to our own self interest,” said Li. “By outsourcing control to an AV, we could potentially enable better decisions to be made on behalf of the group, both in terms of safety and fair sharing of the road.”
The introduction and assimilation of any new technology changes how we behave; we are reshaped by the tools we create, and Li believes we are at a point of inflection in the development of AVs. “Instead of being passively changed by our technology, we can be proactive in envisioning the type of society we want to create. I’m determined to actively use this technology to benefit human society.”
Advancements in the fields of data analysis and machine learning will be key to refining the effectiveness of intelligent transport systems, and computational research will be a central focus of Li’s work at USC – aligning with the university-wide Frontiers of Computing initiative.

“To implement successful intelligent transport systems at this stage, you have to understand human behavior” -Ruolin Li
“Transportation is becoming increasingly data rich,” said Li. “It’s an exciting time, and there’s a lot of work to be done to identify how to leverage the potential of that data while also navigating issues of privacy. Where better to study mobility and congestion than Los Angeles? We have lots of problems to solve, and the city is the ideal testbed for strategies that can be applied globally.”
In conversation with Li, you get a sense of her forensic eye for traffic patterns – the way that a bottleneck develops, or how the intervention of a roundabout can dramatically change the duration of a commute. Through her lens, even the most minute aspects of a daily drive become a source of fascination. “My imagination was captured by this field of research because of its incredible versatility across multiple areas of knowledge – from engineering, to economics, to public policy, to psychology,” said Li, “You could say, to be interested in transport is to be interested in everything.”
The next time you’re stuck in rush hour, experiment with applying the engineer’s curious, analytic and problem-solving perspective. While we wait for the day when we can sit back and scroll our emails or watch a movie en-route, it’s one way to stay entertained while keeping our eyes on the road.
—
Ruolin Li will be launching a new course in Spring 2025: CE599, Game Theory for Interactive Autonomy. This course uses game theory as a framework to model, analyze and design the complex interactions between autonomous agents and humans.
Published on October 17th, 2024
Last updated on October 18th, 2024