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Projects

Dist-KISS

This project is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and focuses on the question how the streetscape and potential interventions in it influence physical distancing compliance. The project team will develop and open source agent-based model of pedestrian physical distancing behavior, calibrate it with user experiments in an immersive virtual environment, and run it for various city streetscapes. The model may serve as a tool for planning and ex-ante evaluation of policy interventions in the streetscape targeting to minimize the spread of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases. The top half of the figure shows examples for streetscape interventions designed to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 disease in Utrecht, The Netherlands: a) pedestrian one-way street, b) sign asking to keep right, c) pedestrian roundabout, including examples of non-compliance. (image © Judith Verstegen). The bottom half depicts and overview of the study set-up consisting of an Agent-Based Model (ABM) of pedestrian behavior and an Immersive Video Environment (IVE).

SIMPORT

The three-year project “Sovereign and Intuitive Management of Personal Location Information” (SIMPORT) is funded by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) in the funding line on improving digital sovereignty. The key goals of SIMPORT are to empower people in managing their personal location information, e.g. when sharing their current location with a location-based service. For this purpose, SIMPORT is developing new forms of interaction to provide people with more fine-grained control over location sharing. The project is also designing learning tools to enable people to better understand how their personal information is being used. In addition, SIMPORT also aims to develop an ethics-by-design approach, which can support developers in creating software that gives more control to its users regarding their location privacy.

GECCO

Gesture-Enabled Remote Communication and Collaboration (GECCO) is a collaborative project with the University of Twente that aims to improve remote collaborative urban planning. Based on existing work at both sides, we are developing new tools for gesture-enabled remote communication and collaboration over tabletop systems with especial emphasis on architectural design and urban planning. A key goal is to create and evaluate an easy-to-use approach that enables different stakeholders to collaborate over a distance and in real-time while working on complex urban planning projects.

o2r

Opening Reproducible Research (o2r) is a DFG-funded project by the Institute for Geoinformatics (ifgi) and University and Regional Library (ULB) at the University of Münster, Germany. Reproducibility of research findings, the ability to repeat experimental procedures and confirm previously found results, is at the heart of the scientific method, yet rather rare in practice (when looking at geoscientific publications). O2R aims to address this by overcoming several hurdles that make it difficult for research to publish in a reproducible way and by demonstrating what benefits and new possibilities result from open reproducible research. In O2R, we are developing and evaluating a system that supports the evolution of scientific publications from static papers into dynamic, executable research documents with the main goals being to improve the exchange of research results that are published over the internet, to facilitate productive access to them, and to simplify their reuse.

DCOMM

DCOMM was a multidisciplinary Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network focussing on deictic communication across several domains and disciplines. Deictic communication includes the use of demonstratives, (pointing) gestures and other means to achieve goals such as directing the attention of someone to a specific object. Psychologists, linguists, computer scientists and companies from several countries collaborated to investigate deictic communication in human-human, human-computer and human-robot interaction. Within the DCOMM, the work at sitcom included the design, implementation and evaluation of different techniques to enable deictic communication between non-collocated human communication partners via mobile phones.

GEO-C

Cities have to continuously strive to provide a sustainable, safe and liveable environment for their ever-increasing populations. In recent years, the term ‘smart cities’ has been coined for initiatives that monitor and analyse different aspects of urban life, and manage service provision intelligently. A key gap in this area relates to how people can understand the processes driving smart cities and their services, and how they can gain a sense of control rather than being controlled by the services provided by a smart city. The EU-funded Innovative Training Network “GEO-C: Enabling Open Cities” aimed to contribute methods and tools to realise smart and open cities, in which all groups of society can participate on all levels and benefit in many ways. The complementary strands of research in GEO-C contributed to an improved understanding of how to build open cities and produced a prototypical open city toolkit. The toolkit consists of apps, services and data that enable cities to easily set up or adapt key services, processes and analyses, and to do so in an inclusive and transparent way.

GDPR in practice

The project “General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in practice: Guidelines for developers” was funded by the Förderkreis der Angewandten Informatik an der WWU and focussed on supporting developers in adhering to the GDPR when developing software. The overall goals of the project were (1) to assess the status quo of how IT companies in the region have responded to GDPR so far, (2) what challenges and resources exist when implementing GDPR compliance, and to (3) create and evaluate guidelines for GDPR implementation. The outcomes of the study highlighted several difficulties companies are facing when implementing the GDPR and led to the development of prototypical webtool that support developers in various ways. During different phases of software development, the tool provides tailored information about relevant aspects of the GDPR and facilitates documenting decisions related to data protection.

Seminar on Location Privacy

This international seminar focussed on location privacy and related issues that arise from using mobile or situated technology as well as location-based services in general. Students and teachers from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis and from the University of Muenster participated and worked together throughout the second half of 2014. Technological, societal and legal aspects were discussed in the context of designing and implementing applications that enables its users to take control of location privacy. Funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the project enabled postgraduate students and members of faculty from both sides of the Atlantic to pay a visit to the other side in order to explore privacy issues across different cultures and legal systems. One of the outcomes were four prototypes/mockups for apps or systems that manage location privacy in innovative ways.