Bernd Resch
Bio: Bernd Resch is a Full Professor of Geo-social AI at IT:U, Austria and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University's Center for Geographic Analysis. Bernd Resch did his PhD in the area of “Live Geography” (real-time monitoring of environmental geo-processes) together with University of Salzburg and MIT. Prior to joining IT:U, he held positions of Associate Professor and Faculty Speaker at University of Salzburg (Austria), Research Director at Heidelberg University (Germany), and Research Affiliate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT (USA). His research interest revolves around understanding cities as complex systems through analysing a variety of digital data sources, focusing on developing multimodal GeoAI machine learning algorithms to analyse human-generated data like social media posts, mobile phone data and physiological measurements from wearable sensors. The findings are relevant to a number of fields including urban research, disaster management, epidemiology, and others. Bernd received the prestigious Theodor Körner Award for his work on “Urban Emotions”. He also established the iDEAS:lab and the Digital City studio, two multi-functional outreach and science communication laboratory environment. Amongst a variety of other functions, he is an Editorial Board Member of IJHG, IJGI and PLOS ONE, a scientific committee member of various international conferences (having chaired several conferences), and an Executive Board member of Spatial Services GmbH.
Pieter Kempeneers
Bio: Pieter Kempeneers is with the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission in Ispra, Italy. He holds an engineering degree in electronics and a PhD in science. His research interests include data analytics, with a particular emphasis on remote sensing and image processing. He has a long-standing commitment to the development and promotion of open-source software. At present, he leads a research team on data analytics at the JRC, focusing on the design and implementation of geospatial agentic artificial intelligence systems.
Tuuli Toivonen
Bio: Tuuli Toivonen is a geographer, professor of geoinformatics and an ERC Consolidator Grantee at the University of Helsinki, where she leads the interdisciplinary Digital Geography Lab at the Department of Geosciences and Geography. Her research focuses on understanding the dynamics of people and places, and their interaction, in both urban and natural environments, using spatial accessibility and mobility as key perspectives. An important part of her work involves developing approaches that leverage open and big data, spatial analytics, and machine learning. In addition to applied geoinformatics, her research contributes to urban geography, land-use and transport planning, sustainability science, and conservation geography.
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