7 Interview Martin Raubal

okay folks uh continuing our series of interviews here I'm here with uh Martin rbau who is a professor of geoinformation engineering at eth zor in

Switzerland one of the best universities in all of Europe hi Martin how you doing doing great Hi Brent so I have a a list of questions for you here as uh you know

and the first question I'm going to ask you is uh just to uh explain do everyone your research interests okay so basically uh in my

group we focus on on uh you know two research issues the one has deals with cognitive engineering for geographic information science so basically uh

bringing cognitive aspects uh into the design of of geospatial services and tools and uh we also have a mobile eye tracking lab uh that is uh you know most

people know static eye trackers that uh basically where you can um you know get sequences of gase patterns and uh we're doing this research with a mobile ey tracker so that means that we can go out

into into the field and really find out you know what is going on when people are trying to solve their wave finding problems when they interact with moob with mobile devices and that provides

feedback to the design of these tools the second area is actually how to use geographic information systems for um energy for typ types of energy meaning

that you know if you do renewable energy planning you create the new wind Park that has to be connected to the energy Network so we do transmission line planning there uh in terms of a

multicriteria decision analysis and we also focus on spatial temporal optimization problems how to locate biomass power plants Etc okay so the

second question I had was um can you tell me a bit about how you began working in um the spatial Computing or the geographic information area well I have to start a little bit

earlier there because when I I graduated from high school I actually wanted to study law and uh in the vacation before

starting the study I was trying to find a job um to pay for my travels and uh so I got a job at the survey the local surveying office and this is how I you

know became familiar with surveying engineering and uh I think one week before the semester started I decided to study surveying engineering

and uh then when I did that actually I became a teaching assistant and there was the time when my professor Andrew Frank came to Vienna and started the gis program and this is how I ended up uh in

GIS you know went to the US for a master's degree did a PhD in information and that's how I got into the area of spatial things spatial engineering

spatial Computing you have one of my favorite um stories about finding uh finding spatial computing

um okay so what do you think has been the most important new technology or research paper in the spatial Computing area in the past few

years um that's a difficult question I I wouldn't want to limit myself to naming one particular thing uh because you know when they came up with location based Services they were always talking about

the killer application and I was always wondering why are you looking for the killer application it's already there it's navigation systems so um last couple of years I would still say that

location based Services is really something that um has you know brought some new ideas into the spatial

Computing area and uh it it actually already went mainstream but uh in terms of uh of the the progress and development there in the area I think

it's some of the new interaction modes that fascinate me so it's You Know audio instructions it's just interacting with various tools with this system and this

whole area that you are quite familiar with the geci you know this integration of geospatial stuff as we name it and human computer interaction well Martin

you've given a great um preview of uh module seven of the course we'll be dedicating a whole module to Geographic human computer interaction so thank you

I'll pay you later um okay next up um I was wondering if you could talk a bit about the project you're working on right now that has you

um particularly excited yeah um I started my job here about three and a half years ago and uh you know I always worked in the area of

spatial cognition and wave finding and one particular problem there was um if we wanted to find out where people make wave finding errors there were certain methods that you could apply like you

know watching people measuring some kind of stuff but we never so it was always the question where did people have problems but we never could get to the

question of why people had these problems so my idea was to come up with that mobile eye tracking lab here at eth surich and I think that uh actually is

very exciting for me and for my group because that gives us some ideas about why do have PE why do people have problems during interaction with mobile systems or during wave finding so uh and

we combined that with location functionality so we actually call it location aware mobile ey tracking because at the same time when we know where people are looking at we know

where they are and uh we know when they look at like landmarks during wave finding when they look at their mobile device when they need help when a decision point is very complex and we

can get a lot of this information just from the gase patterns alone so by looking at the gase patterns we can automatically find out whether people are lost whether they have problems with

orientation with finding landmarks and so on so this whole map matching process and I think uh mobile it tracking brought really A New Perspective into my research which I am quite excited about

yeah some of that work coming out of your group is is really quite impressive um the the paper at the workshop last year I I very much enjoyed well thank you Martin for your time you're welcome

brand it's nice talking to you