Digital Geography Lab blog

The MetropAccess-project from the University of  Helsinki, and the SNAMUTS (Spatial Network Analysis for Multi-modal Urban Transport Systems) -project from Australia are organizing a summer seminar focusing on the analysis of urban accessibility on Friday the 10th of June at the University of Helsinki, Kumpula Campus. The event will be held in the Exactum-building, room CK112 from 9.30 am until 2 pm. See the preliminary program for the seminar here (only in Finnish).

During the day, we will hear presentations about tools and data for studying multimodal accessibility in the capital region of Helsinki, future scenarios of accessibility, and international comparisons between different urban regions.

The Australian research group SNAMUTS has studied accessibility in 24 city regions. We will hear more about  indicators in their study and results regarding the city region of Helsinki. We will also have a look at the ongoing work in the MetropAccess-project regarging mobile phone data and the modeling of real movement patters of people.

The goal of the both projects is to provide useful information about multimodal accessibility for urban planners. We would like to warmly welcome city planners, consultants researchers and students within this field!

The event is organizen both in Finnish and in English. Sign up for the seminar before the 5th of July via this link (add  your name, organization and email address): https://elomake.helsinki.fi/lomakkeet/61968/lomake.html

Maria Salonen will be defending her thesis  “Analysing spatial accessibility patterns with travel time and distance measures: novel approaches for rural and urban contexts” on 7th November at 12 o’clock noon in the lecture hall 5 of the main building of the University of Helsinki, Rein Ahas acting as the opponent and Tommi Inkinen as custos. Her thesis summary is available in the e-thesis service.

Henrikki received the best thesis of the year price from the national GI association ProGIS ry, with his thesis “Geographic knowledge discovery from sparse GPS-data – Revealing spatio-temporal patterns of Amazonian river transports“. The price was divided between four theses.

Our research group is organising a mini-symposium on

Utilising novel spatial data sources in analyzing and understanding human mobility patterns and accessibility

on Thursday, November 6th, between 2pm-4pm at Kumpula campus, Exactum room C124 :
* Rein Ahas, the University of Tartu, talking about using mobile phone data in analyzing the spatial mobility patterns
* Anders Larsson and Erik Elldér, University of Gothenburg, about human spatial interaction and mobility in various forms

 

Welcome!

Our article “Joukkoliikenteellä, autolla ja kävellen: Avoin saavutettavuusaineisto pääkaupunkiseudulla” (‘By public transportation, private car and walking: Open accessibility data set of Helsinki Region’) was published in Terra.

Our article also introduces a new article format ‘Data descriptions’ that is a publication for descriptions of scientifically valuable datasets that aims at helping the researchers to publish, discover and reuse research data thus promoting open science.

Our work and accessibility related tools are introduced in an article that was published in City of Helsinki Urban Facts’ journal Kvartti. Journal is openly available here (in finnish/swedish).

We have new publication out in Applied Geography:

“Do suburban residents prefer the fastest or low-carbon travel modes? Combining public participation GIS and multimodal travel time analysis for daily mobility research” by Maria Salonen, Anna Broberg, Marketta Kyttä and Tuuli Toivonen.

See the full article here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0143622814001465

 

We have two new publications available from our Publications page.

First one introduces methods (i.e. MetropAccess-Reititin tool) to calculate travel times in Helsinki Region based on public transportion schedules.

The second one introduces methods and tools to analyze travel times and speeds in Peruvian Amazonia based on our pilot Amazonia Riverboat Observation System (AROS) and Trajectory Reconstruction and Analysis Tool (TRAT) that is designed to analyse and extract information from AROS GPS-data.

We had two presentations from our group in OGRS 2014 conference dedicated to exchanging ideas on and results from development and use of open source geospatial software in both research and education.

Juha Järvi had a presentation about the MetropAccess-Reititin (i.e. Router) which is a tool designed to analyze travel times and accessibility in urban areas based on public transportation schedules.

Henrikki Tenkanen had a presentation about our accessibility research in Peruvian Amazonia. He told about the pilot observation system (AROS) that we have developed for tracking the local riverboats navigating along the Amazonian rivers and about the open source analysis tool (TRAT) that is developed to analyze the data from the observation system.

Our project leader Tuuli Toivonen was selected 29.04.2014 as new tenure track professor at the Department of Geosciences and Geography, University of Helsinki. Tuuli will start in her new position in the autumn of 2014.

Congratulations Tuuli!