New CEUS paper published – presenting our open-source library Trackintel

Over the past years, MIE lab has been developing an open-source Python library for analyzing human mobility data. Trackintel provides a standardized pipeline for loading, preprocessing, and analyzing tracking data, as shown in the graphic below.  In the paper titled “Trackintel: An open-source Python library for human mobility analysis”, we describe the functionality of the library and

CSFM Seminar Talk on Spatial Data Analytics for Sustainable Mobility

Professor Martin Raubal and Thomas Hettinger from SBB will give the first Center for Sustainable Future Mobility (CSFM) seminar talk on spatial data and data analytics for sustainable mobility on 23 March 2023, 17:00-​18:10 at ETH Zentrum CAB G 51, ETH Zurich. For more information, please check here.  

New TR_C paper online – “Conserved quantities in human mobility”

Our new paper entitled “Conserved quantities in human mobility: From locations to trips” was accepted at Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies and is now available online. We use two high-resolution user-labelled datasets from ~3800 individuals to analyse individuals’ activity–travel behaviour over the long term. We find that individuals maintain a conserved quantity in the

New CEUS paper online: “Graph based mobility profiling”

Our new paper on “Graph based mobility profiling” was accepted at Computers, Environment and Urban Systems (CEUS) and is now available online. We propose a graph based workflow to identify groups of persons with similar mobility behavior based on person specific graphs that describe the mobility behavior. Our approach is privacy friendly, does not depend

New TGIS Paper is Online – “Street-level Traffic Flow and Context Sensing Analysis”

Our new paper entitled “Street-level traffic flow and context sensing analysis through semantic integration of multisource geospatial data” by Yatao Zhang and Martin Raubal is now online at TGIS. Sensing urban spaces from multisource geospatial data is vital to understanding the transportation system in the urban context. However, the complexity of urban context and its

Kick-off of the e-bike city lighthouse project

What if 50% of the existing urban road space was allocated to e-bikes and the slow modes? Seven chairs at the department for civil engineering at ETH join forces to analyze the opportunities and effects of an urban future giving priority to cycling, micromobility and public transport. Our group will contribute with the developement of

Received Best Vision Paper Award at the ACM SIGSPATIAL’22 Conference

Our paper “Causal Inference for Interpretable and Robust Machine Learning in Mobility Analysis” won the Best Vision Paper Award at the 30th ACM SIGSPATIAL Conference in Seattle, USA. This year’s vision paper selection has been very competitive given the large number of submissions. Among the six selected vision papers invited for presentation, our paper, presented

New SIGSPATIAL Paper Is Online – “Improving next location prediction”

We are delighted to announce that our paper “How do you go where? Improving next location prediction by learning travel mode information using transformers” by MIE Lab members Ye Hong, Henry Martin, and Martin Raubal is now online at arXiv and will be presented at ACM SIGSPATIAL, November 1–4, 2022, Seattle, WA, USA conference. In

Challenge award at HackZurich for “The Energymanager”

We participated at the largest Hackathon in Europe, HackZurich 2022, with a team of former and current PhD student of our group, and our app was awarded the challenge price by the company Sensirion! We developed a tool that utilises temperature sensors and building floor plans to serve as a digital energy consultant (for details,

MIE-Lab Represented at World Cities Summit, 2022

The resilience of a road network refers to its ability to bounce back to the desired level of serviceability after a disruption. After an accident, a more resilient transportation network can restore the flow of traffic faster than a less-resilient network. At the WCS Science of Cities Symposium, researchers from MIE-lab presented the preliminary findings

MIE-Lab Members Co-Organized and Attended the Zurich Mobility Data Workshop

MIE-Lab members attended the Zürich Mobility Data Workshop sponsored by IARAI at the University of Zürich on July 20th. The workshop brought together researchers based in Zurich that work on different mobility research topics to discuss the results and insights learned in the NeurIPS Traffic4cast competition series organized by IARAI. The workshop sparked a lively

Best paper award at AGILE conference

Our paper “Unlocking Social Network analysis methods for studying human mobility” received the Best Paper Award at the 25th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science! Nina Wiedemann presented the paper in Vilnius, Lithuania, and it was elected by the audience out of three papers pre-​selected by the conference committee. In the paper we demonstrate how

New article in Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews published

How well can you charge your battery electric vehicle with solar power generated from your own roof? Our latest journal article “Using rooftop photovoltaic generation to cover individual electric vehicle demand—A detailed case study” shows that this works surprisingly well even without a dedicated battery home storage. The article was also featured in the ETH

3rd place in the Traffic4cast 2021 extended challenge

Nina Wiedemann of MIE Lab achieved 3rd place in the NeurIPS 2021 Traffic4cast competition! In this year’s extended challenge, the task was to predict traffic volume and speed in unknown cities, based on movie-format spatio-temporal data. Our team could improve the generalisation ability of the convolutional neural network with a patch-based approach. For more details

New Survey Paper Is Published – “Applications of Deep Learning in Congestion Detection, Prediction and Alleviation: A Survey”

How can deep learning be used to make road travel safer and faster at the same time? Can we achieve these two objectives while ensuring fairness across individuals or user groups? How important is the percentage of data available for better model performance? Are there potential conflicts of interest if a small number of private

New Project “Interpretable and Robust Machine Learning for Mobility Analysis” Starts

Our new project “Interpretable and Robust Machine Learning for Mobility Analysis” officially starts today! The project aims to bring together the knowledge of GIScience and Machine Learning, advancing our understanding of how interpretable and robust machine learning methods (especially deep learning methods) can be tailored to mobility analysis with the support of causal inference. This

MIE Lab LinkedIn Page Is Launched

We launched our MIE Lab LinkedIn page! Follow our updates on LinkedIn here.

We Welcome Dr. Esra Suel to MIE Lab

Dr. Esra Suel joins our team as a Senior Assistant. She is a Research Fellow (part-time) at the School of Public Health, Imperial College London. Since 2018, she also held a Senior Data Scientist position at the Swiss Data Science Center, ETH Zurich where she collaborated with MIE Lab. She obtained her PhD from the

New IJGIS Paper Is Published – “Anomaly Detection for Volunteered Geographic Information: A Case Study of Safecast Data”

A paper titled “Anomaly Detection for Volunteered Geographic Information: A Case Study of Safecast Data” by Dr. Yanan Xin is recently published online. Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is a promising new data source for scientific research. However, many scientists are concerned about the quality of VGI data for research, given the lack of rigorous and

A Clustering-Based Framework for Individual Travel Behaviour Change Detection

In our recently published 2021 GIScience paper “A Clustering-Based Framework for Individual Travel Behaviour Change Detection“, we propose a clustering-based pipeline to delineate travel behaviours and detect possible change periods/points from raw GPS recordings. In particular, considering trip mode, trip distance, and trip duration as travel behaviour dimensions, we measure the similarities of trips and

New Project V2G4CarSharing Is Funded by the SFOE

Our new project “V2G4CarSharing” in collaboration with Hive Power and Mobility is funded by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy (SFOE) mobility research program. The project aims to develop and evaluate optimal strategies to integrate car-sharing and Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G). By integrating car-sharing and V2G, our research will tackle core issues related to the stability of

We Welcome Nina Wiedemann to MIE Lab

Nina Wiedemann joins MIE-Lab as a Ph.D. student. She completed her Master’s degree in Data Science at ETH Zürich and Bachelor’s degree in Cognitive Science from the University of Osnabrück, Germany. We welcome Nina to our team!

Keynote and paper presentation at the 12th International Symposium on Digital Earth (ISDE12)

The MIE-Lab will be present at ISDE12 in Salzburg this year. Professor Martin Raubal will give a keynote with the title: Spatial decision-making for sustainability on Tuesday July 6th. Furthermore, Henry Martin will present the paper Using Information and Communication Technologies to facilitate mobility behavior change and enable Mobility as a Service in the solution

Ye Hong Presented at GeoPython 2021

Ye Hong introduced the trackintel framework at GeoPython 2021. Trackintel is an open-source python framework for human mobility modelling and analysis. Find out more on GitHub.

We Welcome Yatao Zhang to MIE Lab

We welcome Yatao Zhang to our team as a PhD student at the Singapore-ETH Centre. Yatao received his Master of Science degree in Cartography and Geographical Information System from Wuhan University, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Geographical Information Science from Sun Yat-sen University in China.

New Book Chapter Is Published – “Geosmartness for Personalized and Sustainable Future Urban Mobility”.

The book chapter titled Geosmartness for Personalized and Sustainable Future Urban Mobility by Prof. Dr. Martin Raubal, Dr. Dominik Bucher, and Henry Martin from the book Urban Informatics is now available online. This chapter demonstrates how geosmartness, a combination of novel spatial-data sources, computational methods, and geospatial technologies, provides opportunities for scientists to perform large-scale

We Are Hiring A New PhD Student

We have a new opening for a Ph.D. position in Mobility Information Engineering. Check here for more details. We are looking forward to your applications!

New IJGIS Paper “Applying Frequent-Pattern Mining and Time Geography to Impute Gaps in Smartphone-Based Human-Movement Data”

A new paper titled Applying Frequent-Pattern Mining and Time Geography to Impute Gaps in Smartphone-Based Human-Movement Data by Dr. Pengxiang Zhao, Dr. David Jonietz, and Prof. Dr. Martin Raubal is published in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science (IJGIS). Abstract: Though GPS-based human trajectory data have been commonly used in travel surveys and human

Prof. Raubal Presented at Treffpunkt Science City

Prof. Dr. Martin Raubal gave a talk on how green are we on the road (in German) at the Treffpunkt Science City event. The presentation is available online here.

Talk by Prof. Raubal at the Fachtagung Elektromobilität Conference

Prof. Raubal gave a talk at the Fachtagung Elektromobilität Conference on Geographic information Analysis for Future Electric Mobility: Smart Charging and Energy Saving Potentials (in German).

Ye Hong Joins MIE Lab

We welcome Ye as our new team member! He holds a B.Sc. in GIS and remote sensing from Sun Yat-sen University, China, and an M.Sc. in Geomatics from ETH Zurich. His work will focus on understanding human mobility behavior and develop models for mobility prediction. Read more here!

Estimation of Moran’s I in the Context of Uncertain Mobile Sensor Measurements

In our recently published 2021 GIScience paper “Estimation of Moran’s I in the Context of Uncertain Mobile Sensor Measurements“, we study the problem of how to quantify the spatial autocorrelation of samples that were recorded at different points in space and time. Such data is commonly produced by mobile sensors, e.g., the temperature sensors of cars,

Doctoral Examination of Dominik Bucher

Dominik Bucher has successfully defended his doctoral thesis titled “Spatio-Temporal Information and Communication Technologies Supporting Sustainable Personal Mobility” on 21 September 2020. His research revolved around the question of how smartphone-tracked individual mobility data can be analyzed and utilized to support people in transitioning towards sustainable mobility usage. To this purpose, analysis methods (that identify transport

We Welcome Dr. Yanan Xin to the MIE Lab Team

We welcome Dr. Yanan Xin as our newest team member. After successfully completing her PhD at the Pennsylvania State University, she joins the MIE lab in the role of the lead researcher.

Exploring Choices between Internal Combustion Engine Cars and Electric Vehicles

In our recent publication “Exploring Factors that Influence Individuals’ Choice Between Internal Combustion Engine Cars and Electric Vehicles“, we use a large dataset of people owning both an Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) car as well as an Electric Vehicle (EV) to determine the impacts of various predictor variables on their choices between the two car

Doctoral Examination of Christian Sailer

Christian Sailer has successfully defended his doctoral thesis on 25 May online via Zoom about the topic “Enhancing Knowledge, Skills, and Spatial Reasoning through Location-based Mobile Learning”. Enhancing Knowledge, Skills, and Spatial Reasoning through Location-based Mobile Learning. In a few minutes I will defend my research of the last 6 years with #omleth. Many thanks

MIE Lab involved in Future Resilient Systems II programme

The second phase of the FRS programme at the Singapore-ETH Centre officially started on April 1st with an online research kick-off meeting. It was launched in the midst of a global crisis – COVID-19, highlighting the need to better understand and foster resilience. Within FRS-II there is a particular emphasis on social resilience to enhance

Interview with Former Lab Member Dr. David Jonietz

Our former lab member Dr. David Jonietz recently gave an interview regarding how geospatial data and a digital map of the world can help transform mobility. Currently a research group leader at HERE Technologies, David Jonietz points out how we can step beyond simple maps to create more comprehensive digital representations of reality, which in

We are hiring!

We are exited to announce that we have an open position in our lab. We are looking for a new post-doc to take over the team lead at the MIE-Lab as soon as possible. If you are interested, please check the description at the ETH jobpage: https://jobs.ethz.ch/job/view/JOPG_ethz_7R9Rl0z6QH6GC0M9Cv

Will we lose our spatial orientation in the future?

The “Tag der Geomatik” is the GISDay of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW) and ETH Zurich and gives insight into the versatility of the field of geoinformatics and surveying. Der #tagdergeomatik ist bereits am Laufen. Schon mehr als 200 Schülerinnen und Schüler besuchen unsere Ausstellung und die Module in Aarau.

Jannik Hamper joins MIE Lab

We welcome Jannik as our new team member! He holds a B.Sc. in Mathematics from FAU Erlangen and a M.Sc. in Statistics from ETH Zurich. His work will focus on applying machine learning and data analysis methods to problems in mobility and energy science. Read more here!

Team MIE-Lab wins second place at IARAI Traffic4cast core competition.

We are happy to announce, that our team scored the second place at the IARAI Traffic4cast competition! The goal of the competition was to predict the traffic in 3 different major cities (Berlin, Istanbul, Moscow) based on high resolution traffic map movies. Over 40 teams participated and submitted a total of over 4000 submissions in

Energy Saving Potential of a Wide Deployment of e-Bikes in Switzerland

With the Energy Strategy 2050, Switzerland committed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 43% until 2035. Currently, the transport sector is the only sector without a decrease in energy consumption. In our recent publication (also presented at Scientifica 2019), we analyzed the energy and greenhouse gas reduction potentials when e-bikes are used instead of internal combustion

Interview with Prof. Martin Raubal in “Basel Unterwegs”

In an interview with Basel Unterwegs (in German), Prof. Martin Raubal talks about trends in mobility, such as combined or shared mobility, mobility as a service, app-based tracking and billing, or how electric cars replace conventional ones. The rising number of bicycles on our roads, the fact that train stations increasingly have the character of shopping

Open Position

Hey Everybody, we are looking for a new PhD student. We are looking forward to your application! https://apply.refline.ch/845721/7060/pub/1/index.html    

Analysis of GPS-tracking for the evaluation of sports activities – Luca Gaia starts his Bachelor thesis

Orienteering as a competitive sport is shaped by local strategies and decisions. Since the beginning of the availability of GPS, movement data of professional orienteering events have been recorded and mostly visually analyzed. However, there is still few work that focuses on the quantitative analysis of the influence of context data such as terrain type,

OMLETH’s publications from ETH’s first Learning and Teaching Fair are online

Several outcomes have been published at ETH’s first Learning and Teaching Fair in November 2018. The article “OMLETH: A multimedia guide for field trips” has been published at the  first ETH Learning and Teaching Journal. The event’s poster has been published here and a summary of OMLETH has been published here. Figure: Christian Sailer explains teaching scenarios with OMLETH ©

Full paper accepted at AGILE 2019!

Our full paper “A Clustering-Based Framework for Understanding Individuals’ Travel Mode Choice Behavior” has been accepted at AGILE 2019 in Limassol, Cyprus!

SBB Green Class and GoEco! are “Paving the Way for Smart Mobility”

In the most recent issue of the “Globe” magazine of ETH Zürich, our projects SBB Green Class and GoEco! were featured as a way to understand human mobility, improve environmental performance and enable intelligent demand management. Multi-modal mobility, trip analysis, eco-feedback generation and smart mobility management are seen as important building blocks for the future of

Presentation of OMLETH at PH Zurich

We were invited for a workshop at PH Zurich’s UNM meeting Teaching with Digital Media to present location-based mobile learning as a teaching strategy. The event was fully booked and divided in keynotes and workshops. The first keynote was held by Anja Wyden Guelpa (Director & founder of civicLab) about “Das Rathaus als Vergnügungspark – Was

Presentation of our work at the SCCER Mobility and CREST conferences

Our poster at this year’s SCCER Mobility conference showed insights gained from the SBB Green Class project. It could be seen that a Mobility as a Service offer such as SBB Green Class (including public transport passes, an electric car, etc.) may substantially lower the carbon footprint of people using it. At the SCCER CREST

The MIE Lab has a new lead researcher

We welcome Dr. Pengxiang Zhao as our newest team member. With his experience in mobility and movement analysis Pengxiang will make a perfect addition to our team, taking the role of lead researcher.

“Capturing Usage Patterns Of A Comprehensive Mobility-As-A-Service Offer With GPS-Tracking – First Results From The SBB Green Class Project” Published by Spotlight on Energy Research

The ETH Zürich Energy Science Center featured an article about our ongoing project with the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) titled “Capturing Usage Patterns Of A Comprehensive Mobility-As-A-Service Offer With GPS-Tracking – First Results From The SBB Green Class Project” on their Spotlight on Energy Research blog. You can read the full article here. At this

Our research on future mobility concepts is featured in an article in Bulletin!

Our team member Dr. David Jonietz was recently interviewed by Bulletin, the leading Swiss magazine for electrical engineering and industry, on current research activities and projects of the MIE Lab. Read the resulting article about future mobility concepts in Switzerland here (in German).

“From Location Tracking To Personalized Eco-Feedback: Results From The GoEco! Study” Published by Spotlight on Energy Research

The ETH Zürich Energy Science Center featured an article about “From Location Tracking To Personalized Eco-Feedback: Results From The GoEco! Study” on their Spotlight on Energy Research blog. You can read the full article here. At this point we would like to thank the Energy Science Center for giving us the opportunity to present our

Journal paper at ISPRS IJGI accepted!

Our paper “Assessing the Influence of Spatio-Temporal Context for Next Place Prediction using Different Machine Learning Approaches” has been accepted at the ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information. We are very happy to announce that it is also featured as cover story of the respective special issue! For more information, visit our publications site.

SBB Launches New SBB Green Class Mobility Package

The SBB (Swiss Railway) have officially launched the new SBB Green Class Mobility Package which combines various sustainable means of transportation and services for road and railway. Researchers from the MIE Lab will further on provide scientific support for this exciting project. For more information visit SBB Green Class

Call for Papers: Spatial Big Data and Machine Learning in GIScience

Together with colleagues from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, we are organising a workshop on “Spatial Big Data and Machine Learning in GIScience” at this year’s GIScience conference in Melbourne, Australia. If you are interested in the process of generating knowledge from large spatial datasets, please note the 1st Call for Papers on the

New project on transportation and logistics for small-scale food producers

Researchers of the MIE Lab are collaborating with alpinavera to survey the transportation behaviour of small-scale food producers in Switzerland and develop alternative concepts! For more information, please visit our projects site.

Full paper accepted at AGILE 2018!

Our full paper “Identifying and Interpreting Clusters of Persons with Similar Mobility Behaviour Change Processes” has been accepted at AGILE 2018 in Lund, Sweden! For more information, visit our publications site.

Extended Abstract accepted at IATBR 2018

Collaborating with our colleagues from IVT – Institute for Transport Planning and Systems at ETH Zurich, our extended abstract titled “Usage patterns and impacts of a mobility flat rate traced with a Smartphone App” was accepted at IATBR 2018 in Santa Barbara, California.

OMLETH at Innovedum Event 2017

The annual Innovedum event on November 23 at the Semper Aula was an opportunity for informal discussion among the Innovedum project leaders, departmental Educational Developers, and students. Around 150 participants attended the event. The Rector gave the welcome speech and presented certificates to the students for their efforts on behalf of Student Innovedum. The event’s

Continuous Trajectory Pattern Mining for Mobility Behaviour Change Detection

Due to recent technological developments, it is now possible to track our movements at a high level of detail and with relatively low effort and cost, e.g., by using built-in GPS-receivers of our smartphones. This novel data source provides exciting new possibilities for increasing the sustainability of our mobility behaviour through monitoring as well as

The MIE Lab is growing!

We welcome Henry Martin as our new team member! With his focus on mobility data analysis, Henry will fit perfectly into the MIE Lab.

News Article in NZZ about SBB Green Class

On the 21st of October, the NZZ reported about the planned one-year extension of the project SBB Green Class, for which we provide the lead scientific support. In the article, Prof. Dr. Martin Raubal reports on selected preliminary findings.

Best Paper Award Nominee at Energieinformatik 2017

Our paper “Using Locally Produced Photovoltaic Energy to Charge Electric Vehicles” shared the second place for best paper with a contribution from the University of Bamberg / LAGRAR at D-A-CH+ Energieinformatik 2017. You can find more information about the paper in our previous post and on our publications site.

3 papers accepted at LBS 2018

Collaborating with colleagues from the GeoGazeLab and the University of Zurich, we have two full papers and one short paper accepted at next year’s LBS conference, which will take place in Zurich, Switzerland. For more information, visit our publications site.

Best Poster Nomination at the 4th SCCER Mobility Conference

The poster “Extracting Eco-Feedback from Movement Trajectories“, which we presented in collaboration with our colleagues from SUPSI, was nominated for the Best Poster Award at the 4th annual SCCER Mobility Conference in Zurich, Switzerland. Over 120 participants from research and industry attended the conference and discussed relevant research topics and projects from the transport and

2. Best Paper Award at COSIT 2017

We are happy to announce that our paper “Timing of Pedestrian Navigation Instructions” was elected 2. Best Paper at COSIT 2017 conference in L’Aquila, Italy!

Interview with Prof. Martin Raubal on the Project SBB Green Class

Prof. Martin Raubal has answered questions regarding our data analyses in the course of the SBB Green Class Project. The full interview (in German) can be found here.

Using Locally Produced Photovoltaic Energy to Charge Electric Vehicles

As more and more countries announce their plans for banning combustion engines (e.g., [1, 2]), it becomes critical to find ecologically sustainable ways to power electric vehicles. While wind and water provide energy throughout the whole day, photovoltaic installations have production peaks around midday which need to captured either by smart appliances (such as washing machines)

Call for participation: Scientific study of location-based mobile learning

Tags : learninglocation-based mobile learningomleth

Dear geography teachers, using mobile phones as an educational tool? Interacting with and augmenting local geographical phenomena via virtual assistants? With ETH’s learning platform OMLETH (Ortbezogenes Mobiles Lernen an der ETH / Location-based mobile learning at ETH), it is possible to go mobile and complete tasks in situ. The platform was developed as part of

SBB Green Class E-Bike!

Tags : sbb

The Swiss Federal Railways (SBB/CFF/FFS) are looking for mobility pioneers for the project “SBB Green Class E-Bike”. People interested in participating in a pilot project that researches people’s use of the combination e-bike/general public transport subscription/Mobility carsharing (“all inclusive”) can sign up on www.sbb.ch/greenclass until July 13. The project is scientifically accompanied by researchers from the

Energy-based Routing and Cruising Range Estimation for Electric Bicycles

Personal mobility is critical for successful cities, but also a major threatening factor for the livability they provide to a growing urban population. For this reason, it is highly important to switch towards more sustainable travel behavior, and substitute many of the trips previously covered by car with smaller and more energy-efficient modes of transport,

Best short paper at AGILE 2017

We are happy to announce that our short paper “Energy-based Routing and Cruising Range Estimation for Electric Bicycles” was elected best short paper at AGILE 2017 conference in Wageningen, The Netherlands! Try out the system on ebikes.dominikbucher.com!

PhD position – Mobility Information Engineering

The Institute of Cartography and Geoinformation is looking for a highly motivated PhD candidate in the area of Mobility Information Engineering at the Chair of Geoinformation Engineering, starting at the earliest possible date. More information here

2 papers accepted at COSIT conference

Collaborating with our colleagues from the GeoGazeLab, we have two full papers accepted at this year’s COSIT conference, which will take place in L’Aquila, Italy. For more information, visit our publications site.

2 shortpapers accepted at AGILE conference

We have two shortpapers accepted at this year’s AGILE conference, which will take place in Wageningen, The Netherlands. For more information, visit our publications site.

New Site is Online

Welcome to the new site of the Mobility Engineering Lab at ETH Zürich. Please stay updated for news and blog posts in the coming weeks!