Between November 11-13 our group actively participated in the 1st edition of the International Land Use Symposium (#ILUS2015) held in Dresden. The symposium was organized by the Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development (IÖR, also based in Dresden), who greatly braved the challenges of organizing this symposium for the first time and who could welcome a number of 80 particpants.
The programme provided and interesting mixture regarding current topics in “Geographic Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery”, “Spatial Modelling, System Dynamics and Geosimulation” and “Multi-Scale Representation and Analysis”. For each topic, there was a keynote session, followed by 2 parallel session including talks about ongoing research in the respective field. A highlight of the symposium were the extensive keynotes given by Denise Pumain from Paris University (“From theory to modelling: The Human-Environment as a Complex System”), Harvey Miller from Ohio State University (“Data driven geography”), Bin Jiang from University of Gävle (“Natural Cities as a New Paradigm for Studying Spatial Structure and Dynamics in the Big Data Era”) and Itzhak Benenson from Tel-Aviv University (“Determinism of parts versus indeterminism of a whole in the era of big data”).
From our group, Stefan Hahmann gave a talk about some first outcomes of our crowdsourcing experiment regarding sidewalk data acquisition entitled: “Detection of Urban Street Properties Using Georeferenced Images and Interpretation from the Crowd”. We were also happy to see a contribution of our former group members Julian Hagenauer and Marco Helbich presenting their earlier work at GISciecne group Heidelberg (“Spatial Analysis with Self-Organizing Neural Networks: The Application of the SPAWNN Toolkit”).
Selected outcomes of the symposium will be part of a special issue of IJGI (“Recent Trends in Spatial Analysis and Modelling of Built-Environment Characteristics”). The 2nd edition of the symposium is currently planned to be held in 2017.