News

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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

 

 

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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.

 

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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.

Figure: Christian Sailer explains teaching scenarios with OMLETH © Heidi Hostettler, ETH Zürich

The project itself is presented to a broader public on the ETH Newspage to promote the fair. The event is illustrated with text and photos on the L&T eventpage.