News

We are happy to announce our next CartoTalk by Sara Fabrikant
Department of Geography, University of Zurich, on 6 June 2018.

Abstract: We use increasingly dynamic and mobile graphic displays for every-day decision making tasks (i.e., daily commutes in congested cities), and to find solutions to and communicate about complex mobility behaviors. However, we still have a poor understanding on how autonomic nervous activity might influence the already limited perceptual and cognitive resources of display users, for example, in time critical situations or in dilemmatic decision-making contexts (e.g., navigation, disaster mitigation and response, search and rescue, etc.). In this talk, I will highlight ongoing empirical research on animated and mobile graphic display use in the lab and in the wild, capitalizing on ambulatory human behavior sensing methods (i.e., eye tracking, galvanic skin response, and EEG measurements). With this collected empirical data and supported by cognitive/vision theories we are guiding the process of designing user, task, and context responsive graphic interfaces for visual salience and positive engagement. In doing so, we aim to create usable and useful responsive displays to support space-time needs of the increasingly mobile digital citizen.

Dr. Sara Irina Fabrikant is a Professor of Geography and heads the Geographic Information Visualization and Analysis (GIVA) group at the GIScience Center of the University of Zurich (UZH). She is a co-director of the UZH Digital Society initiative and associated Fellow of the UZH|ETH|ZHdK Collegium Helveticum. Her research and teaching interests lie in visual analytics (geovis), GIScience and cognition, graphical user interface design and evaluation, including dynamic cartography. She is a current elected Vice President of the International Cartographic Association. Her service includes memberships and functions with Swiss Science Council, the Association of American Geographers, the North American Cartographic Information Society, and the Swiss Society of Cartography.

Wednesday, 6 June 2018, 11:00
Seminar Room 127
Gußhausstraße 27-29, 3rd floor

We are happy to announce a CartoTalk on 14 May 2018 by Nico Van de Weghe from Gent University.

Abstract: In this Cartotalk, the interdisciplinary projects UGESCO and EURECA will be presented. In this ongoing work, an interdisciplinary approach (Natural Language Processing, Computer vision, Metadata analysis, Spatio-temporal querying and visualization, and LBS) is followed. In this cartotalk, an overview of the project will be given (with specific focus on the Geo-ICT aspects), as well as avenues for future research and cooperation.

In UGESCO/EURECA, we focus on finding traces of European regions that have shaped the cities in which we live today, and we develop tools to easily explore them when visiting a city. Different historical, architectural, economic, political and cultural reasons form the base of these traces, and we use input from each of these domains to reveal the cultural heritage items that can be linked to these specific European regions/origins. The enriched metadata that is generated for the city archives and collections can be used as input to perform new fundamental research and applied studies, but also to facilitate the exploitation of the collections to a broader public and attract new groups of cultural heritage consumers. LBS that run on top of our enrichments, for example, will allow tourists to explore the traces of a specific European region (e.g. Austria) in the city (e.g. Ghent) and show them the collection items at their corresponding point of interest (POI) using their mobile device.

Nico Van de Weghe is professor in geomatics at the Department of Geography (UGent, Belgium). He is specialized in the tracking of moving objects; visualizing, analyzing and modeling of spatiotemporal information; and cognition and linguistics of moving objects. On the one hand, he has a broad experience in fundamental research with respect to handling moving objects (going from accuracy issues in data acquisition, over analyzing, reasoning, modelling and data-mining, towards visualizing and visual analytics). On the other hand, he gained a wide experience in setting up experiments in the area of Geographical Information Technology (e.g. research of the movement behaviour of persons at mass-events). Nico is author of more than 80 papers referenced on the Web-Science.

Monday, 14 May 2018, 10:00
Seminar Room 127
Gußhausstraße 27-29, 3rd floor