Laura Knoth winning EDC 'student-of-the-year' award!

As an ESRI Development Center, Z_GIS every year has the opportunity to nominate one top student based on his or her software development competence. This year this special honour is awarded to Laura Knoth for work on for her MSc Thesis "Spatial Information Infrastructures for Indoor Environments".

While outdoors positioning is well established using GNSS, indoor positioning still is posing challenges. Despite the fact that people spend about 90% of their time indoors, no single indoor positioning method (Wi-Fi, RFID, Bluetooth Low Energy, Ultra Wide Band, etc.) has up to now broadly established itself. However, indoor location information could provide valuable and important information to support various applications, such as “smart homes”, navigating large indoor spaces, police and firefighting operations or in combination with different sensors the ac-quisition of indoor environmental parameters (air quality, temperature, etc.).

The main goal of this thesis  was the design, development and validation of an easily manageable, yet comprehensive structure for the integration of 2D/3D building models and real time location. Both components (building information and real time positioning) are treated in separate workflows. The base for both workflows have been the formats as they are used in reality: building plans drawn in CAD (Computer Aided Design) as well as positioning data from a smartphone app. Both data sources have to be preprocessed to be finally integrated into a 2D- and a 3D-visualisation. The entire workflow was implemented using ESRI products (CityEngine, ArcMap, ArcScene, Geoevent Processor, ArcObjects Add-in, ArcGIS Server, ArcGIS API for Javascript) as well as Safe FME for data transformations.

Congratulations to this distinction, and to continuing a tradition of excellence established by previous recipients of this award like Robin Wendel in 2015! Laura recently has started to continue her research in this field after receiving a PhD grant - we are looking forward to excellent future results :-)