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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.

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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 the understanding of how socio-technical systems perform before, during and after disruptions. MIE Lab researchers will contribute within a research cluster focusing on distributed cognition (led by Martin Raubal). More specifically, we will develop a methodology and prototype for detecting weak signals in mobility data to identify potential disruptions.

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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 turn can be used for traffic prediction and management, optimization of mobility systems, and more.

Read the full interview on the SCCER Mobility homepage.

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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.

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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!

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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 the competition. You can check out our code and the documentation!

As the second place we won 5000$ and an invitation to present at NeurIPS 2019.

Not all members of our competition team are officially affiliated with the MIE-Lab, so special thanks to Ye Hong, Christian Rupprecht and René Buffat!

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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 engine cars for commuting. Our analysis includes different scenarios for the minimal temperature, maximal precipitation as well as trip duration acceptable to take the e-bike. The results show that energy reductions between 10% and 17.5% are possible.

If you are interested in the saving potentials in your municipality, please click the following link: https://mie-lab.github.io/commuter-ebikes-ch.

You can find the paper under https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335118713_Energy_and_greenhouse_gas_emission_reduction_potentials_resulting_from_different_commuter_electric_bicycle_adoption_scenarios_in_Switzerland.

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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 malls, or the large number of bike- and scooter-sharing companies further hint at changes in how we perceive and use mobility.

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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