News - Archiv

2016
Sept. 27-30	Sara Irina Fabrikant, Gianluca Boo and Annina Brügger each presented their current work at the GIScience 2016 conference in Montreal, Canada, from September 27 to 30. Gianluca Boo won the award for the best poster presentation and Annina Brügger won the award for the best short paper.
March15	Annina Brügger defended her PhD Proposal "Automation in Mobile Maps and its Impact on Spatial Knowledge Acquisition" at the GIScience Center's GIScience Colloquium
March 2	Esri hosts the video-recordings of this year's Cartographic Summit: Future of Mapping (#cartosummit), which took place February 8-10, 2016 in Redlands, California (USA). The presentation recordings of each speaker are available online now.
March 1	In her role as Vice President, Sara Fabrikant participated in the Executive Committee (EC) Meeting of the International Cartographic Association (ICA), hosted by EC member Pilar Sánchez-Ortiz Rodríguez at the National Geographic Institute (IGN) in Madrid, Spain, from February 25 to 27, 2016. ICA EC meetings are a forum for deliberations and decision making regarding organizatorial and strategic matters of the ICA.
Feb. 24	Annina Brügger and Thomas Koblet (Esri Schweiz) organized a half-day workshop at our department on February 24, 2016. Ismini-Eleni Lokka, André Bruggmann and 20 other phd and master students participated in the course focusing on ArcGIS Online.
Feb. 15	GIVA is glad to welcome two new members of the team! Gloria Lorena Lopez (Administrative Assistant) and Morris Schmid (GIVA Intern) will support our team until the end of July 2016.
Feb. 12	The paper ‘Mining the Co-Existence of POIs in OpenStreetMap for Faulty Entry Detection‘, written by Alireza Kashian, Kai-Florian Richter, Abbas Rajabifard, and Yiqun Chen, has been accepted for the academic research stream at this year’s Locate conference. The paper outlines Alireza’s approach to identifying how plausible a newly registered POI is based on how other POIs of the same type are embedded within an environment. The conference will be held in Melbourne, Australia, from April 12 to 14.
Feb. 3	Sara Irina Fabrikant will give the keynote talk at the seventh international EuroVis workshop on Visual Analytics (EuroVA 2016), which will take place June 6-7, 2016 in Groningen, the Netherlands.
Feb. 2	The International Cartographic Association (ICA) and Esri will host invited guests at the Cartographic Summit: Future of Mapping to examine new directions in mapping, which will take place February 8-10, 2016 in Redlands, California (USA). As one of the invited speakers, Sara Irina Fabrikant will give a lightning talk on "Evidence Based Design".

2015
Dec. 08	André Bruggmann was invited to give a talk at the Cappelli Hackathon at the Historical Seminar of the University of Zurich on October 22nd. In his talk titled "Geographisch-interaktive Darstellung des HLS“ he presented latest findings of his ongoing PhD project about the extraction and visualization of spatio-temporal information in text documents about Swiss history and how to present this information to target users in an interactive visual analytics interface.
Nov. 02	For the fall semester 2015, Kenan Bektas has joined as a visiting researcher to the School of Computing in Clemson University, SC, U.S.A. As an invited speaker to the "School of Computing Fall 2015 Seminar Series" he presented "Gaze Contingent Geovisualization: Design and Implementation of a Testbed for Computational and User Experiments" on October 2nd.
Sep. 29	Jérémie Ory, a PhD student at the IGN in Paris supervised by Sidonie Christophe and Sara Fabrikant, presented "How do map readers recognize a topographic mapping style?" at the ICC 2015 conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The full paper will appear in the second issue, vol. 52, of The Cartographic Journal.
Sep. 29	Sara Maggi presented "How Do Display Design and User Characteristics Matter in Animated Visualizations of Movement Data?" at the ICC 2015 conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She presented the results of a user study with animated air traffic control displays. This user study was designed and realized in collaboration with ENAC, an aviation-oriented university in Toulouse, in particular with Christophe Hurter and Jean-Paul Imbert. The full paper will appear in the next special issue of Cartographica.
Sep. 24	Sara Irina Fabrikant, past Chair of the Cognitive Visualization Commission of the International Cartographic Association (ICA) was elected Vice President by the Member Nations of ICA at its 16th General Assembly in Rio de Janeiro (BRA) in August 2015. She thus joins the ICA Executive Committee for the term 2015-2019. She will be the EC liaison to the Art and Cartography, Cognitive Issues in Geographic Information Visualization, and Maps and the Internet Commissions.
Sep. 18	We are delighted to announce that Alžbêta Brychtová (Postdoc), Zbynêk Štěrba (Postdoc), Hossein Ajallooiean (Virtual Reality Developer) and Oliver Deseö (Junior Data Scientist) will join the GIVA group in the autumn.
Aug. 5	GIVA alumn Dr. Stefano De Sabbata will join the department of geography at University of Leicester as lecturer in quantitative geography. The GIVA unit sends its best wishes and congratulations to the former staff member.
June 11	The paper 'Defensive Wayfinding: Incongruent Information in Route Following' written by Martin Tomko and Kai-Florian Richter has been accepted for this year's Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT). The conference will be held on October 12-16 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
May 25 - 29	The short paper "A Testbed Combining Visual Perception Models for Geographic Gaze Contingent Displays" written by Kenan Bektas, Arzu Coltekin, Jens Krüger and Andrew Duchowski has been accepted for the 17th Annual Eurographics Conference on Visualization (EuroVis 2015), organized in Cagliari, Sardinia Italy. The paper has received the Best Short Paper Award.
May 21	Kai-Florian Richter presented at the Web and Wireless Geographic Information Systems Symposium in Grenoble, France, on 'A Mobile Application for a User-generated Collection of Landmarks’. This work reports on the outcomes of Marius Wolfensberger’s MSc thesis.
May 4 - 8	Kenan Bektas presented the poster "Combining Human Visual System Models for Geographic Gaze Contingent Displays" at the 36th Annual Conference of Eurographics in Zürich Switzerland. The corresponding paper has been written by Kenan Bektas, Arzu Coltekin, Jens Krüger and Andrew Duchowski.
Apr. 10	Boom von Navigationssystemen - Unser Orientierungssinn geht auf Krücken: Wir kennen die Welt, wie sie das Navigationssystem sieht. Ohne digitale Hilfsmittel kommen viele immer schlechter zurecht. Verkümmert unser Orientierungssinn? Quelle: Süddeutsche.de
Jan. 5 - Mar. 18	Dr. Zbynek Šterba, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Geography at Masaryk University in Brno (CZ) is visiting the group for 10 weeks collaborating with GIVA members on empirical research.

2014
Dec. 2	Gianluca Boo defended his PhD Proposal Space-Time Analysis of Tumor Incidence: Companion Animals as Public Health Sentinels at the GIScience Center's GIScience Colloquium.
Nov.	Sara Fabrikant interviewed by a journalist of ADAC's Motorwelt (the monthly magazine of the German Automobil Club) for the December 2014 issue on the use of navigation systems compared to paper maps.
Nov. 24	Sara Fabrikant interviewed by a journalist from The Atlantic's Citylab, on how to make a better map—using neuroscience. This as a result of the attendance at the cross-disciplinary "Vespucci workshop on brain and space" and the recently announced Nobel Prize in Physiology\|Medicine to Neuroscientists O'Keefe, May-Britt and Edvard Moser for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain.
Nov. 13	Sara Fabrikant interviewed by a journalist from Swiss TV about the wonders of digital maps including cartograms and 3D maps (in German only)
Nov. 10 - 14	Gianluca Boo attended the OIE Training Course on GIS Management and Spatial Analysis in Veterinary Public Health in Mira (VE), Italy. The event has been jointly organized by the Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale delle Venezie, Italy and the EpiCentre/mEpilab of the Massey University, New Zealand. The aim of the course was to acquire a better understanding of spatial analysis methods for the investigation disease clusters, by looking at both temporal and spatial evolution of animal epidemics.
Oct. 10	Arzu Coltekin gave a talk on "Visual Illusions in Cartography" at the NACIS Conference in Pittsburgh, USA . The talk illustrated the importance of visual illusions in design and further provided a discussion on the terrain reversal illusion based on the recent paper published at the International Journal of Digital Earth (URL to the paper: http://www.geo.uzh.ch/~arzu/publications/bernabe-coltekin-2014.pdf) and other recent experiments.
Oct. 5	Arzu Coltekin organized and held a workshop titled "Geodesign: Visualizing Cities – Envisioning Sustainable Urban Futures" in collaboration with Chris Pettit at the Joint International Conference on Geospatial Theory, Processing, Modeling and Application, Toronto, Canada. She has also gave a talk at the conference titled "Which Geographic Tasks Require Realistic Visualizations" where she sampled results from various user studies to discuss the appropriate use of realism in relation to map use tasks and user groups.
Sept. 23 - 26	Arzu Coltekin also presented "Eye-hand coordination during visual search on geographic displays" at the ET4S 2014 workshop in Vienna, Austria. The talk offered an analysis of eye movements in combination with an analysis of mouse movements and demonstrated usefulness of the combined use of the two. André Bruggmann presented 'Spatializing time in a history text corpus' at the GIScience 2014 conference in Vienna, Austria. The talk introduced a framework that applies geographic information retrieval and geovisual analytics to an online dictionary about Swiss history. The talk specifically focused on how to automatically extract and visualize temporal information from the online dictionary, as to allow an information seeker to explore whether and how spatial relationships between historically relevant Swiss toponyms might have changed over time. Sara Maggi presented "Embodied decision making with animations" at the GIScience 2014 conference in Vienna, Austria. She presented a subset of preliminary results of a human-subject experiment with animations in the context of air traffic control. The talk focused on how animation design type and user characteristics (e.g., expertise and psycho-physiological state) might influence visuo-spatial decision-making with animations. Sara Maggi also presented "Triangulating Eye Movement Data of Animated Displays" at the ET4S 2014 workshop in Vienna, Austria. The talk introduced some methodological challenges in our triangulating approach based on eye tracking records, galvanic skin conductance responses, and electroencephalography data.
Aug. 31 - Sep. 6	Sara Fabrikant attended the cross-disciplinary Vespucci workshop on brain and space featuring the latest advances on how animals and humans navigate in (virtual) lab and real-world space. This happened not one minute too early, see the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain. How this relates to what we do, see Beyond the Nobel: What Scientists Are Learning About How Your Brain Navigates
July 9	Strong showing of GIVA members at the GIScience 2014 conference (web link: http://www.giscience.org/): All 5 submissions (two full papers and three extended abstracts) were accepted for oral presentation at the main conference in Vienna, Sep. 23-26, 2014. Pre-conference workshop contributions are also all accepted, with further involvements by GIVA members as workshop co-organizer, program committee members, and keynote speaker.
June 11 - 17	Sara Fabrikant delivers a keynote at the 20th anniversary event of the Institute for Geoinformatics (ifgi) at the University of Münster. http://www.uni-muenster.de/Geoinformatics/en/anniversary/index.html
June 4	André Bruggmann presented 'How to visualize the geography of Swiss history' at the 17th AGILE International Conference on Geographic Information Science in Castellón, Spain. The talk introduced an approach which combines text data mining methods, currently employed in GIScience and geovisual analytics, to extract, re-organize and visualize spatial information contained in an online dictionary about Swiss history.
May 20	Landmarks structure environments. For us humans they form cognitive anchors, markers, or reference points for orientation, wayfinding, and communication. And they pose major challenges for computational systems. A new book “Landmarks - GIScience for Intelligent Services” written by Kai-Florian Richter (GIVA) and Stephan Winter (University of Melbourne) summarizes more than a decade of research aiming at integrating landmarks into geospatial services. The book covers cognitive, conceptual, computational, and communication aspects of landmarks and argues why producing and understanding landmarks is a necessity for truly intelligent geospatial systems. The book has just appeared with Springer.
March 10	Paul Crease successfully defended his thesis titled "Representation of Geographic Relevance in Mobile Applications".
February 26	Sara Maggi presented 'Assessing Animated Air Traffic Control Displays' at the CARTOCON conference in Olomouc on February 26th, 2014. She showed preliminary results of her first user study with air traffic control animations. More information about CARTOCON: http://cartocon2014.org/.
February 26	Jointly with Stephen Hirtle and Paul Munro (School of Information Science, University of Pittsburgh) Kai-Florian Richter will run a workshop on 'Advances in GIScience' at this year's iConference (ischools.org/iconference-2014/) in Berlin. The workshop will take place on March, 4th, 2014.

2013
August 28	André Bruggmann presented 'Cartograms of self-organizing maps to explore user-generated content' at the 26th International Cartographic Conference in Dresden, Germany. The talk introduced a perceptually salient and cognitively adequate mapping solution to structure, visualize, and visually explore user-generated data (e.g., Wikipedia).
August 26	Sara Fabrikant gave an overview of activities with the ICA Cognitive Visualization Commission during the first plenary event of the 26th International Cartographic Conference in Dresden, Germany. (web link : http://www.icc2013.org/?node=29)
August 1	Promotion of Sara Fabrikant to full professor.
May 1	Stefano De Sabbata starts at Oxford University. His work at the Oxford Internet Institute focuses on Internet and information geographies, as well as on geographic and mobile information retrieval. First task on the job: ground truth a milestone in the history of geographic information visualization and analysis: John Snow's water pump in London.
April 8	Dr-Ing Kai-Florian Richter starts as a new Lecturer (Oberassistent). Kai-Florian joins the group coming from the Department of Infrastructure Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Australia, where he has spent the last three years. Kai-Florian is interested in questions of (task-specific) relevance, spatial communication, and cognitive aspects of human-computer interaction.
March 18	Stefano De Sabbata successfully defended his thesis on the 1st of November. His thesis is titled "Assessing Geographic Relevance for Mobile Information Services".
March 6	Sara Maggi presented 'Animated displays of moving objects and spatiotemporal coordinated events' at the GeoViz conference in Hamburg on March 6th, 2013. In a 10 minute oral presentation, she introduced her on-going PhD project, in particular her first experimental study with animated displays, which will be conduct in June 2013. More information about GeoViz: http://www.geomatik-hamburg.de/geoviz/.
March	The abstract submission of A. Bruggmann, M. Salvini, and S. Fabrikant was accepted for oral presentation at ICC 2013 in Dresden, this August. http://www.icc2013.org

2012
Dec. 14	At the promotion ceremony Marco Salvini also received a distinction by the Science Faculty (MNF) in recognition of his PhD thesis. He investigated the potential of massively crowdsourced, user-generated databases (e.g., Wikipedia) for the systematic analysis of the global city network and the space of flows within these systems in his dissertation titled Spatialization von nutzergenerierten Inhalten für die explorative Analyse des globalen Städtenetzes http://giuz.createsend1.com/t/j-l-jjiliky-l-a/.
Nov. 28	Marco Salvini presented “Die Stadt im Netz” in the series of lectures “Netzwerke in der Schweiz - Netzwerke in der Welt” of the “Geographisch-Ethnographische Gesellschaft Zürich” at the University of Zürich. The talk pointed out the potential of crowdsourced user-generated data and visual analytics for the empirical investigation of the world city network.
Nov. 1	Marco Salvini successfully defended his thesis on the 1st of November. His thesis is titled "Spatialization von nutzergenerierten Inhalten für die explorative Analyse des globalen Städtenetzes".
Oct. 15	Marco Salvini presented “Die Stadt im Netz” in the series of lectures “Netzwerke für eine vernetzte Welt” of the “Ostschweizerische geographische Gesellschaft” at the University of St. Gallen. The talk pointed out the potential of crowdsourced user-generated data for the empirical investigation of the world city network.
Sept. 18-21	GIVA involvement at AutoCarto/GIScience in Columbus, Ohio (USA): Keynote at AutoCarto by Sara Irina Fabrikant: How we know that maps work. GIScience/AutoCarto Joint Panel on research challenges in GIScience \| Cartography with Stephen Hirtle, Menno-Jan Kraak, Alan MacEachren, Anne Ruas, and Terry Slocum, moderated by Sara Irina Fabrikant. Papers presented at GIScience: Scale-dependent validation framework for spatialization by Marco M. Salvini and Sara Irina Fabrikant, and "Emotional response to map design aesthetics", by Sara Irina Fabrikant, Sidonie Christophe, Georgios Papastefanou and Sara Maggi.
July 3-7	The keynote “Creating geovisual analytics displays that work” by Sara Irina Fabrikant at the GI_Forum 2012 in Salzburg offered insight on how cognitive science and visualization research can help GIScientists in general and cartographers and geovisual analytics developers in particular to systematically assess their increasingly dynamic and interactive display designs.
June	Marco Salvini and Sara Fabrikant's extended abstract submissions were both accepted for oral presentation at GIScience 2012 in Columbus Ohio, this September. www.giscience.org
March 5	Jan Wilkening successfully defended his Thesis on the 5th of March. His Thesis is titled 'The effect of time pressure on map-based decision making' and focuses on the empirical evaluation of the effectiveness and efficiency of different visual spatio-temporal displays for time pressured decision makers.
January 26	Stefano DeSabbata presented 'Classical vs. Crowdsourcing Surveys for Eliciting Geographic Relevance Criteria' at the 3rd Italian Information Retrieval Workshop in Bari, Italy on January 26th, 2012. Copies can be found at www.geo.uzh.ch/~sdesabba/. He will also present 'Criteria of Geographic Relevance: An experimental study' as an invited speaker at Lugano (CH), Faculty of Informatics, University of Lugano (USI) on April 20th 2012. http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title%7Edb=all%7Econtent=g929822340

2011
Dec. 23	In December 2011, Kenan Bektas gave a well-received talk to students and academics of the Marmara University, Faculty of Engineering, Istanbul. The talk encompassed his current PhD work and was titled 'Geo-virtual Environments, Level of Detail Management and Geofoveation'.
Nov. 24-26	The International Cartographic Association's Cognitive Visualization Commission Chair Sara Fabrikant, together with Co-Chair Amy Griffin (UNSW ADFA), busy working at the ICA Chairs Meeting in Vienna, Austria.
Nov. 23	Stefano De Sabbata and Tumasch Reichenbacher have had a paper titled "Criteria of geographic relevance: an experimental study" accepted for publication in the International Journal of Geographic Information Science.
Nov. 1	A full paper titled "The Relevance of Scale in Soil Maps" by Madlene Nussbaum, Linda Ettlin, Arzu Çöltekin, Brigitte Suter, Markus Egli has been published in the BGS Bulletin (November issue).
Oct. 4	Arzu Coltekin was invited to deliver a public talk on interdisciplinary research at TEDxZurich on October 4th 2011 which took place in Swiss Television Studios http://www.tedxzurich.com/speakers-2011/. The talk was viewed by approximately 500 participants and 3000 viewers online real time, and the video is published here: http://www.tedxzurich.com/speakers-2011/
Sept. 15	Arzu Coltekin was in the organizing committee of Tokyo, STGIS2011 (http://curricula.csis.u-tokyo.ac.jp/stgis2011/oc.html). She also presented a session keynote and a paper. Kenan Bektas also presented a paper. Proceedings of the conference can be found here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/18770428?oldURL=y
Jul. 1	Arzu Coltekin and other GIVA members played a key role in the organisation of the workshop "Persistent problems in geographic visualization". This event was held by the ISPRS Commission on Geographical Visualization and Virtual Reality and ICA Commission on GeoVisualization in Paris on July 1st 2011. Contributions to the workshop and the program can be found here: http://geoanalytics.net/ica/icc2011workshop.htm
June 24	Anna-Katharin Lautenschütz defended her thesis "Assessing the Relevance of Context for Visualizations of Movement Trajectorie" successfully.
May 8	Jan Wilkening and Sara Fabrikant's publication "How do time pressure and realism affect map-based decision making?" was accepted as a full paper for the 10th International Conference on Spatial Theory (COSIT 2011) in Belfast, Maine, USA (Sep 12-16, 2011).
May 7	The "GIRunners" team with Kenan Bektas, Jan Wilkening, Silvan Kaspar, Paul Crease, Sara Fabrikant, Marco Salvini and other runners from GIS and RSL successfully participated in the SOLA 2011.
May 2-6	Sara Fabrikant delivered a three hour lecture section on state-of-the-art and recent developments in geovisualization research at the spring school 2011 of the "Groupement de Recherce Méthodes et Applications pour la Géomatique et l`Information Spatiale" (GDR MAGIS) (http://ecole-magis.imag.fr/). The GDR MAGIS is a research network within the CNRS in France, focusing on recent developments in geomatics research. The spring school was held this year at the CNRS center Paul Langevin in the Savoy Alps, France, May 2-6.
March	Sara Fabrikant (PI) has been awarded a 3-year research grant titled "AniMOVE: animated visual analytics of movement" by the Swiss National Science Fund, supporting one PhD student to develop and empirically evaluate methods for the effective and efficient dynamic depiction and analysis of moving phenomena. This interdisciplinarly research project is in collaboration with Prof. Alexander Klippel (GeoVISTA Center, Penn State, USA) and Prof. Tim Shipley (Psychology Dept. at Temple University, USA).
February 2	From the 3rd to the 8th of July the GIVA Department will be (almost) empty, but not because we all plan to take summer holidays at the same time!! All but two members of the department submitted papers and extended abstracts to the ICC 2011 Conference in Paris and all submissions were accepted for presentation. The titles and authors of the papers to be presented are as follows: Fabrikant S.I., Salvini M.M.: Charting the ICA World of Cartography 1999–2009 Kaspar S., Fabrikant S.I., Freckmann P.: Empirical Study of Cartograms Gnos A.U., Salvini M.M., Fabrikant S.I.: Cognitively Plausible Visualization of Network Data Kuhn M., Pfister S., Vontobel I., Willi C., De Sabbata S., Çöltekin A.: TIMELINE: A Tool for the Video Analysis and Visualisation of Geographic Phenomena over Time Wilkening J., Fabrikant S.I.: The Effect of Gender and Spatial Abilities on Map Use Preferences and Performance in Road Selection Tasks Crease P., Reichenbacher T.: Adapting Cartographic Representations to Improve the Information Seeking of LBS Users http://www.icc2011.fr/
January 8	The paper “Formalizing semantic spaces for information access” co-authored by Sara Fabrikant and Barbara Buttenfield (2001) received the 3rd highest citation count (based on the ISI Citation Database) amongst the most cited “Methods, Models, and Geographic Information Systems” (MMGIS) papers that appeared in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers during the period 2001-2009. For more information on the intellectual contributions of American academic geography over the past 100 years have a look at the Centennial Forum of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, published in its December 2010 issue. www.informaworld.com

2010
September 14 -17	Zurich, Switzerland was the host city of the sixth GIScience, continuing a highly successful series of conferences that commenced in 2000, and which regularly attracts over 200 international researchers. GIScience 2010 aims to bring together scientists from academia, industry, and government to discuss the state-of-the-art in geographic information science, and explore emerging research directions. The conference focused on basic research findings across all sectors of the field, and pure application papers were discouraged. The conference had two refereed submission tracks: full papers and extended abstracts. http://www.giscience2010.org/
September 7	Silvan Kaspar received a grant for his Master Thesis "Empirical Study Of Cartograms" advised by Sara Fabrikant from the AAG Cartography Specialty Group (CSG). About the awards: Enrolled Master's students are invited to apply for the CSG Master's Thesis Research Grants. These grants are intended to promote scholarly research in cartography by students enrolled in Geography or a related degree program. The grants are awarded three times per year; the next application deadline is 1 November 2010.
August 27	Sara Fabrikant gave an invited talk titled "Spatialization – A Live Raft for the Data Tsunami?" at the working group "Digital vs. reale Worlds - The Limits of Computer Models?" of the interdisciplinary „Alpbacher Technology Talks” at the European Forum Alpbach. The Alpbach Forum has an international and interdisciplinary reach, and its “Technology Talks” are aimed at discussing current issues and future trends that may be relevant for research policy and technology development in Austria. In this context Sara Fabrikant was interviewed by Radio Austria (ORF 1) about her research. The content of the interview (in German) is available here.
June 14	Jan Wilkening, Stefano DeSabbata, Arzu Çöltekin, Kenan Bektas and Anna Katharina Lautenschütz all had extended abstracts accepted for presentation at the GIScience 2010 conference held on 14-17th September in Zürich. Titles for these presentations can be found on the following GIScience 2010 web page .
June 4/5	The PhD Seminar II took place in Stels, Switzerland.
May 11-14	Arzu Çöltekin gave a talk at the GeoVA(t) workshop and chaired a session at the AGILE 2010 conference in Guimarães, Portugal.
April 27	Tumasch Reichenbacher gave a well received presentation at the University of Heidelberg. The presentation was titled "Das Relevanzprinzip in der mobilen Geovisualisierung”.
April 20 & 22	While the volcano kept erupting on iceland, Sara Fabrikant was invited to deliver the department colloquia at the geography departments of Michigan State University in East Lansing, and The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.
April 16	We would like to motivate our people to submit their work and participate at the Innovation Award of E-GEO.ch involving geodata. The award honors participants who contribute to NSDI with their innovative ideas and projects, and promotes education and research in the realms of geo-information in Switzerland.
April 15	Sara Fabrikant co-organized once again popular sessions on cognitive issues at the world's largest gathering of geographers the Association of American Geographers Meeting, in Washington, D.C.
April 1	Kenan Bektas and Arzu Çöltekin have had their paper accepted at the LNGC True 3D workshop. The paper is titled “Survey of True 3D and Raster Level of Detail Support in GIS Software”.
March 16	Arzu Çöltekin had a paper accepted for presentation at the GIScience 2010 conference. The presentation will take place on the 14-17th September, 2010 in Zürich.
March 1	Sara Fabrikant and Anna-Katharina Lautenschütz had a paper accepted that will be presented at a workshop during the 20-Year Revival Meeting on Cognitive and Linguistic Aspects of Geographic Space Conference on July 5th. 2010 at Las Navas del Marques, Avila, Spain. The paper is titled “Creating perceptually salient animated displays for spatially coordinated events”.
February 18	Stefano DeSabbata successfully presented his accepted paper at the 6th Geographic Information Retrieval Workshop. Zurich, Switzerland, 2010. The paper is titled “A Probabilistic Model of Geographic Relevance” and can be found in the Proceedings of the 6th Geographic Information Retrieval Workshop.
February 1	Sara Fabrikant had a paper accepted titled “The Natural Landscape Metaphor in Information Visualization: The Role of Commonsense Geomorphology”. This paper can be found in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vol. 61, No. 2: 253-270.
January 27-28	Stefano DeSabbata attended the First Italian Information Retrieval Workshop 2010 in Padua.
January 1	Sara Fabrikant was elected to serve on the Editorial Board of the highly ISI-rated Annals of the Association of American Gegoraphers. Sara Fabrikant co-authored a paper titled “Thinking about the Weather: How Display Salience and Knowledge Affect Performance in a Graphic Inference Task”. The paper was accepted for publication in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol., 36, No. 1: 37-53. Sara Fabrikant had a paper accepted titled “Cognitively inspired and perceptually salient graphic displays for efficient spatial inference making.” This paper can be found in Annals of the Association of American Geographers,Vol. 100, No. 1: 1-17.

2009
Nov. 15-21	GIVA MSc students were well represented at the International Cartographic Conference (ICC 2009) organized by the International Association of Cartography (ICA) in Santiago de Chile. Benedikt Heil (paper co-authored with Tumasch Reichenbacher) and Silvio Zanola (paper co-authored with Sara Fabrikant and Arzu Çöltekin) presented their Master's/Diplom theses research to a packed auditorium.
Sept. 19-26	Benedikt Heil (advisor: Tumasch Reichenbacher) presented his MSc thesis at the German-speaking Geographers' meeting in Vienna.
Sept. 21-25	Jan Wilkening and Anna-Katharina Lautenschütz presented their dissertation projects at the international doctoral colloquium of the 9th International Conference of Spatial Information Theory (COSIT) 2009 in Aber Wrac'h, France. Simone Garlandini (advisor: Sara Fabrikant) presented the results of his Master's thesis at the COSIT 2009 main conference and the corresponding paper appeared in Springer's internationally peer-reviewed Lecture Notes in Computer Science (co-author: Sara Fabrikant).
Sept. 2-4	The GeoRel group delivered a paper to the International Symposium on LBS & TeleCartography in Nottingham, where Paul Crease presented an overview of the GeoRel project.
Aug. 24-28	Kenan Bektas of the GeoF group presented his first conference paper (co-authored with Arzu Çöltekin) at the True3D conference in Dresden and was later invited to submit it to Springer's Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography.
June - July	Anna-Katharina Lautenschütz spent one month with Prof. Mary Hegarty (PhD committee member) at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) Psychology Department, developing human-subject testing procedures for her dissertation research. Anna-Katharina Lautenschütz also delivered a colloquium on her PhD project to the interdisciplinary spatial cognition research group at UCSB.
May 6-8	Arzu Çöltekin was invited as a speaker and panelist to a special session on visual attention and efficient image coding at the IEEE Picture Coding Symposium 2009 in Chicago.
April 4	Tumasch Reichenbacher contributed work on the role of location in geographic relevance to an interdisciplinary workshop on Location and the Web associated with CHI 2009 in Boston.
April 1	The website of the Zurich Graduate School in Geography was launched. The Zurich Graduate School in Geography offers the possibility to study for a Doctoral degree across the breadth of Geography, in the research fields of Physical Geography, Human Geography and Methodological Geography.
March 14-18	Sara Fabrikant continued to co-organize sessions at the world's largest gathering of geographers, the Association of American Geographers' (AAG) annual meeting, which brought together over 7'000 people in Las Vegas this year. Her four respective sessions on cognitive issues in geographic information visualization featured 15 papers and averaged about 70 attendees per session. Together with Prof. Amy Lobben (Oregon State University) S. Fabrikant co-edited a special issue of 'Cartographica' featuring cognitive geovisualization papers from the previous AAG meeting in Boston in 2008. Cedric Gabathuler (advisor: Sara Fabrikant) secured his own funding to spend several months at San Diego State University to work with his co-advisor Prof. André Skupin on his Master's thesis, developing an online self-organizing mapping system for Swiss census data. Cedric presented his Master's thesis work at the AAG 2009 in Las Vegas and discussed with Dr. Waldo Tobler Prof. em. from the University of California Santa Barbara and honorary professor of the University of Zurich the ramifications of the notion that 'everything is related to everything else, but closer things are more related than distant things'... Cedric's first co-authored paper with computer scientist Marc Kramis (Uni Konstanz) appeared in a special issue of the ISI-rated Cartography and Geographic Information Science (CaGIS) journal.
Jan. 9	Frank Ostermann successfully defended his PhD thesis titled Modeling, analyzing and visualizing human space appropriation (advisor: Sabine Timpf) and took up postdoc positions with GIVA (GeoRap project) and GIS (Tripod project) in the Department.