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!

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”.

His research describes how an Location-based Mobile Learning (LBML) system utilizing GIS technology enhances the educational learning outcomes with a special focus on the spatial thinking process. Furthermore, this dissertation describes novel approaches of visual analytics with 2D and 3D map web components to produce new teaching strategies during the activities and new metacognitive strategies to evaluate and reflect the activity.
His presentation includes the study of case studies in universities, vocational schools, and informal education environments using design-based research to develop a mobile-friendly interactive mapping platform and the main study conducted in a secondary school under real conditions. Here, the evaluation focused on the impact of the technology regarding the learning performance and the teaching activities before, during, and after the activity. The results reveal a better cognitive learning outcome in classroom exams when a teaching sequence of several weeks includes an outdoor activity of a double lesson. Moreover, there is potential for enhancing learning beyond the outdoor part to improve spatial reasoning. Long-term self-assessment of the learners, however, resulted in no impact, whether cognitively or affectively. The workload for outdoor teaching compared to classroom teaching is higher mainly due to the profound inspections of the location. The findings and their implications for research and teacher education were discussed in order to corroborate the educational value of LBML to motivate educators using LBML strategies for teaching.

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.

This year’s event took place as part of the “200yrs Swiss Geo X” events at the Culture and Convention Centre in Aarau and was held under the motto: how is our habitat recorded, what do we learn from the spatial data obtained and how do these data enable the sustainable design of our future habitat.

Our MIE-Lab module addressed the question whether we will lose spatial orientation in the future if we completely outsource navigation to a computer system and give up personal perception of space. This module with the ETH-App OMLETH took place outside in the old town of Aarau and provided GPS-based  tricky exercises for spatial perception and orientation.  Back in the congress centre the results were evaluated in classes, visualised (see the collection of six classes by 5 groups each) and discussed with the participants. A great event with a glittering feedback wall in the thumbs-up area.

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, weather conditions, or elevation, on a runner’s performance in a professional setting. Apart from the influence of context data on the runner’s performance Luca will also quantitatively investigate the effect of the environment (e.g. the terrain, especially vegetation and landmarks) on orientation mistakes.

The bachelor thesis will last until the end of the spring semester 2019.

 

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 mobility domain. Andreas Lischke (DLR Berlin) and Michael Frambourg (Volkswagen AG) held keynotes on the future of heavy-duty freight transport as well as future plans towards more sustainable passenger cars.

Both speakers emphasized the importance of an (economic and scientific) investement in alternative fuels next to pushing battery technologies forward. This point was later again highlighted, within the context of the rising shares of CO2 emissions from flight travels. With respect to Switzerland, three key topics were discussed in particular: 1) the logistics challenge, 2) passenger mobility in cities and regions, and 3) energy for transportation.