We are delighted to announce that Professor Matthew Zook from the University of Kentucky, USA, and Professor Jukka M. Krisp from Augsburg University, Germany, have been nominated to the Visiting Professors of the Mobility Lab and the Department of Geography of the University of Tartu starting from January 2023. This will continue and formalise our long-term collaboration and make a great addition to our current Visiting Professor and the Honorary Doctor of the University of Tartu, Professor Frank Witlox from Ghent University, Belgium. Also, Professor Jussi Jauhiainen from the University of Turku, Finland, has been a long time Visiting Professor of our Department and the Chair of Human Geography.
We asked for some reflections from our newly nominated members.
My work with the Dept. of Geography at the University of Tartu has been an exciting collaboration around different forms of locational user data that can be used to provide new insights on mobility, neighborhood change, gentrification, and spatial segregation. The researchers at Tartu have been excellent partners in thinking about useful and ethical applications of big geodata. I look forward to many more visits to Tartu including enjoying the Christmas market on Raekojaplats, trips along and beside Emajõgi as well as my ongoing search for the best Sauna in Southeastern Estonia.”
Matthew Zook
Matthew Alan Zook is a University Research Professor in Geography at the University of Kentucky and the Managing Editor of the peer-reviewed open-access journal Big Data & Society. He gave his first course in Tartu in the academic year 2013/14 while being a Fulbright Scholar at our department and has participated in teaching since then. Currently, Prof. Zook is responsible for a module in a graduate-level course Geography, Communication and Spatial Mobility (6 ECTS). Matthew is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Mobile Tartu Conference series and held a keynote speech at the conference in 2018. He served as a guest editor of the Mobile Tartu Conference special issue in the International Journal of GIS (2014-2015, Zook et al. 2015) and has published other articles with the researchers from the Mobility Lab (Ahas et al. 2015, Poom et al. 2020).
It is very good to hear that Prof. Matt Zook, Prof. Frank Witlox, Prof. Jussi Jauhiainen & me have joined the University of Tartu as Visiting Professors, that cover the US, Belgium, Germany and Finland. This is a fantastic international outreach. With the collaborative administration of the Mobility Lab, we will continue our fruitful, long-standing relationship and intensify it in the coming years. I am looking very much forward to it.”
Jukka Krisp
Jukka Matthias Krisp is a Professor of Applied Geoinformatics at Augsburg University and the Vice-Chair of the International Cartographic Association Commission on Location Based Services. He has participated in teaching at the Department of Geography since the academic year 2013/14 much thanks to the EU Erasmus+ teaching mobility programme. Currently, he is responsible for an elective graduate-level course Visual Data Mining (2 ECTS). Jukka is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Mobile Tartu Conference series and he served as a guest editor of the Mobile Tartu Conference special issue in the Journal of Location Based Services (2016-2017, Ahas et al. 2018). Jukka is one of the few scholars who has participated in all Mobile Tartu conferences since 2008!
Close collaboration between Jukka, Matthew, Frank and the Mobility Lab was established by our dear friend Rein, the founder of the Lab. We are very happy to continue this close friendship and collaboration and advance it further in the coming years!
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.