Auriol Degbelo

Shivam Gupta, Auriol Degbelo

Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents opportunities to develop tools and techniques for addressing some of the major global challenges and deliver solutions with significant social and economic impacts. The application of AI has far-reaching implications for the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in general, and sustainable urban development in particular. However, existing attempts to understand and use the opportunities offered by AI for SDG 11 have been explored sparsely, and the shortage of empirical evidence about the practical application of AI remains. In this chapter, we analyze the contribution of AI to support the progress of SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities). We address the knowledge gap by empirically analyzing the AI systems (N = 29) from the AIxSDG database and the Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS) database. Our analysis revealed that AI systems have indeed contributed to advancing sustainable cities in several ways (e.g., waste management, air quality monitoring, disaster response management, transportation management), but many projects are still working for citizens and not with them. This snapshot of AI's impact on SDG11 is inherently partial, yet useful to advance our understanding as we move towards more mature systems and research on the impact of AI systems for social good.

Viktor Gorte, Auriol Degbelo

Choropleth maps and graduated symbol maps are often used to visualize quantitative geographic data. However, as the number of classes grows, distinguishing between adjacent classes increasingly becomes challenging. To mitigate this issue, this work introduces two new visualization types: choriented maps (maps that use colour and orientation as variables to encode geographic information) and choriented mobile (an optimization of choriented maps for mobile devices). The maps were evaluated in a graphical perception study featuring the comparison of SDG (Sustainable Development Goal) data for several European countries. Choriented maps and choriented mobile visualizations resulted in comparable, sometimes better effectiveness and confidence scores than choropleth and graduated symbol maps. Choriented maps and choriented mobile visualizations also performed well regarding efficiency overall and performed worse only than graduated symbol maps. These results suggest that the use of colour and orientation as visual variables in combination can improve the selectivity of map symbols and user performance during the exploration of geographic data in some scenarios.

Auriol Degbelo

The availability of open data and of tools to create visualizations on top of these open datasets have led to an ever-growing amount of geovisualizations on the Web. There is thus an increasing need for techniques to make geovisualizations FAIR - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. This article explores what it would mean for a geovisualization to be FAIR, presents relevant approaches to FAIR geovisualizations and lists open research questions on the road towards FAIR geovisualizations. The discussion is done using three complementary perspectives: the computer, which stores geovisualizations digitally; the analyst, who uses them for sensemaking; and the developer, who creates them. The framework for FAIR geovisualizations proposed, and the open questions identified are relevant to researchers working on findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable online visualizations of geographic information.

Lucas Braun, Auriol Degbelo, Christian Kray

Germany has witnessed an influx of forced migrants in recent years. Promoting social interaction with the local community is key to supporting the resettlement of these newcomers. Location-based freecycling services present important benefits due to freecycling's potential to bolster social engagement and location-based services' ability to adapt to the user's context. Yet, their potential to support forced migrants' resettlement is yet to be examined. We conducted needs assessment interviews with 11 participants in Muenster, Germany. We analyzed the interview results to develop user requirements for location-based freecycling services. We then implemented a subset of the user requirements as a prototype mobile app called Geofreebie. The evaluation of the app with 22 participants showed that Geofreebie offered two key advantages for forced migrants' resettlement: it increased the size of their social network, and created a sense of community on their side. These findings can benefit researchers and developers of location-based services to support forced migrant resettlement.

Lasse Einfeldt, Auriol Degbelo

Smartphones are now ubiquitous, yet our understanding of user interface factors that maximize mobile user experience (UX), is still limited. This work presents a controlled experiment, which investigated factors that affect the usability and UX of a mobile incident reporting app. The results indicate that sequence of user interface elements matters while striving to increase UX, and that there is no difference between tab and scrolling as navigation modalities in short forms. These findings can serve as building blocks for empirically-derived guidelines for mobile incident reporting.

Auriol Degbelo, Brhane Bahrishum Teka

The increasing availability of open government datasets on the Web calls for ways to enable their efficient access and searching. There is however an overall lack of understanding regarding spatial search strategies which would perform best in this context. To address this gap, this work has assessed the impact of different spatial search strategies on performance and user relevance judgment. We harvested machine-readable spatial datasets and their metadata from three English-based open government data portals, performed metadata enhancement, developed a prototype and performed both a theoretical and user-based evaluation. The results highlight that (i) switching between area of overlap and Hausdorff distance for spatial similarity computation does not have any substantial impact on performance; and (ii) the use of Hausdorff distance induces slightly better user relevance ratings than the use of area of overlap. The data collected and the insights gleaned may serve as a baseline against which future work can compare.

Christian Kray, Auriol Degbelo

With the arrival of digital maps, the ubiquity of maps has increased sharply and new map functionalities have become available such as changing the scale on the fly or displaying/hiding layers. Users can now interact with maps on multiple devices (e.g. smartphones, desktop computers, large-scale displays, head-mounted displays) using different means of interaction such as touch, voice or gestures. However, ensuring map functionalities and good user experience across these devices and modalities frequently entails dedicated development efforts for each combination. In this paper, we argue that introducing an abstract representation of what a map contains and affords can unlock new opportunities. For this purpose, we propose the concept of map plasticity, the capability of a map-based system to support different contexts of use while preserving usability and functionality. Based on this definition, we discuss core components and an example. We also propose a research agenda for realising map plasticity and its benefits.