Thursday, March 30, 2017

Martin Loidl awarded PhD degree

Yesterday, Martin Loidl, member of the Z_GIS team, successfully defended his PhD Thesis  „Spatial Information and Bicycling Safety". In his thesis Martin investigated the potential contribution of spatial information towards a better understanding of bicycling safety and to the mitigation of bicycling safety risk. 

On the one hand spatial models are developed and conceptually described to assess the network’s quality in terms of bicycling safety level and to estimate traffic flows. On the other hand spatial and temporal analyses aim to gain insights in patterns and dynamics of bicycle crash occurrences. Finally, both approaches are used in conjunction in order to estimate the bicycle crash risk on the local scale level, while spatial implications, such as spatial heterogeneity and the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP), are made explicit. 

Around 30 attendees listened to Martin’s impressive and challenging presentation which was followed by a fruitful discussion between Martin and the evaluators, Dr. Thomas Blaschke from Z_GIS and Dr. Andreas Koch from the Department of Geography at the University of Salzburg. Dr. Josef Strobl as the main supervisor acted as the chair. 

In addition to his work in the UNIGIS distance learning programme, Martin is currently involved into two projects. The interdisciplinary project GISMO, led by Z_GIS,  aims to support healthy mobility in the application context of corporate mobility management initiatives: https://gismoproject.com/ .
 The target of the project FamoS is to establish a sound data basis for user-group specific traffic models and planning tools, with a focus on active mobility: http://www.zgis.at/index.php/de/research/research-projects/14-ffg-asap/215-famos-2016-2018
More information about Martin’s work can be found here: https://gicycle.wordpress.com

We wish Martin all the best for his future career! 

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