It’s that time of year for students—who wish to graduate in spring—to choose their thesis topic. This Monday, the Department of Geography organized a fair introducing the research labs and their topics in our department. It brought together undergraduate and graduate students to be supervised by doctoral researchers, postdocs, and senior staff members.
Mobility Lab was present with almost a full team! As an icebreaker, students could throw dice to let fate decide their topic, data, method, and supervisor. The game provided both realistic outcomes and such, which would require a bit more fantasy to be fulfilled 😊 The dice-exercise became very popular also among the senior staff of our department!
We proposed thesis topics in the fields of population distribution, mobility and accessibility, crises readiness, quality of living environment, social (in)equality, and tourism to be analysed based on a variety of mobility data coupled with sensor, register, topographic, or interview data. Some topics are related to ongoing projects, such as oPEN LAB, GreenStreets, or the longitudinal study of people’s activity spaces traced with MobilityLog, our developed smartphone app.
It was a fun and lively event with casual engagement between students and staff members. We look forward to the spring when the exciting research will be conducted and theses ready to be defended!
The Mobility Lab of the University of Tartu is an interdisciplinary research group that studies human mobility and its associations with society and the environment using mobile (big) data.