At the dawn of 2024, it is time to look back to the past year, which has brought many great memories and fruitful actions for our lab. As the Mobility Lab, we are an ever-dynamic group of human geographers at the University of Tartu, keen on human mobility research and spatial analytics using mobile big data.
The year started off with nominating our long-term collaborators, Prof. Jukka Krisp from Augsburg University and Prof. Matthew Zook from the University of Kentucky, as our Visiting Professors. Together with the Visiting Professor Frank Witlox from Ghent University, they have contributed to teaching at the Department of Geography already since the academic year 2013/2014!
We have been very lucky to welcome new young members to our lab in 2023. In March, a geography student Jürgen Öövel joined our lab as a research assistant. Apart from geography, he loves photography, plays ultimate frisbee, and has started to engage in folk dance. June brought us a new member, Elise Jalonen, as a mobility specialist. Elise loves folk dancing, hiking, and hunting, and she is a wonderful event organiser. Note that she is the technical secretary of the Mobile Tartu 2024 conference, so you will most likely get in touch with her when preparing your visit to Tartu in June 2024! In September, Martin Haamer started his PhD studies with us. Martin is keen in transport modelling, and outside studies, he is a talented choir singer. The young generation takes care of an active social life in our lab and even at the department, more broadly!
While welcoming new members, we also had to say (hopefully temporarily) farewell to our postdoctoral researcher Karl Saidla and his family. Karl is now back in Ottawa and takes care of the final steps of publishing his research results in transport policy of bike share systems. Stay tuned!
One of our core activities is the supervision of students’ thesis. Ten master’s students and two bachelor’s students defended their degree under the supervision of our lab members in 2023. Elise Jalonen, Mariia Bochkova and Kaarel Hendrik Zernant graduated from the MSc programme in Geography; Lika Zhvania, Anita Līvija Rozenvalde, Ayisha Yusibova, Nikolay Kozlovskiy, Raúl García Estévez, and Winnard Semenyo Tutu-Brempong graduated from the MSc programme in Geoinformatics for Urbanised Society, and Kertu Uiboleht graduated from the MSc programme in Environmental Technology. Laura Liisa Koldekivi and Emma Belinda Semilarski got their BSc degree in Computer Science. Theses defended at the University of Tartu are available at the DSpace repository. Open access spatial data and scripts developed in some of the theses – such as spatial layers on street space greenery, air pollution, and noise, or digital twin prototype for urban overheating management – are accessible from our public GitLab repository.
The supervision of the theses to be defended in 2024 and even 2025 has begun. To ensure a smooth start, the Department of Geography arranged a thesis topic fair in October, which was a lot of fun both to staff and students.
During the spring semester 2023, we arranged the second season of the public online lecture series in Mobility Analysis and Planning for Human-Scale Cities. This year, the series featured Prof. Harvey Miller, Dr. Elias Willberg, Mari Jüssi, Prof. Margit Keller, Prof. Hans Orru, Õnne Kask, Prof. Huyen Le, and Dr. Karl Saidla as our guest lecturers from academy, public sector, and consultancy. We are grateful to all lecturers for their marvellous contributions as well as to the U.S. Embassy in Tallinn to arrange the lecture of Prof. Harvey Miller as part of the US Speaker Program. All lectures can be streamed from the website https://transportplanning.ut.ee/lectures2023.
As scientific output, we published research papers and popular scientific articles on environmental exposure analytics in street space, human mobility analytics for crisis management, associations between mobility behaviour and personality traits, and transnationalism. Our members presented their research at various seminars, webinars, and conferences both in Estonia and abroad. We arranged several thematic sessions at the Tartu Planning Conference, which is the main annual event for spatial planning related professionals in Estonia.
In 2023, new research projects on mobility analytics for rescue network and vehicle-to-grid technologies for equitable zero-emission transition started. Also, our lab leads the University of Tartu mobility survey, which features an online survey among students and staff members as well rich secondary data analytics on lesson plans, business trips, bike share trips, and parking data. A H2020 R&I project oPEN Lab continues for some more years. Some key projects also ended in 2023, such as individual research projects on exposure to greenery and noise in active travel environments (Age Poom) and public policy for successful bike share (Karl Saidla) as well as a larger project on vicious circles of segregation (led by Prof. Tiit Tammaru). Many of the results from these projects are in the progress to be published, stay tuned!
We shared and discussed ongoing research in our biweekly research seminar series. The series featured many exciting in-person visitors, starting with our Visiting Professors Frank Witlox and Matthew Zook. Also, Prof. Ákos Jakobi from the Eötvös Loránd University, Prof. Jaroslav Burian from Palacký University, Dr. Elias Willberg from the University of Helsinki, and Prof. Amnir Hadachi from the University of Tartu visited us this year and introduced their research. The year ended with an online seminar held by Prof. Andres Sevtšuk from MIT. Throughout the year, our lab members Siiri Silm, Anto Aasa, Veronika Mooses, Ago Tominga, and Arvi Kiik as well as our BSc and MSc students shared their ongoing work with the rest of the team to gain insights and develop their work further.
We were happy to continue our active research collaboration with the Digital Geography Lab at the University of Helsinki. Our members Janika Raun finished, and Veronika Mooses conducted their postdoctoral studies in Helsinki in 2023. We also had an interesting PhD research exchange: our member Ago Tominga made a 2-months’ research visit to Helsinki while Elias Willberg from Helsinki came to Tartu for a month to learn from lab-based exposure research and finalise his thesis. Furthermore, Tuuli Toivonen and Silviya Korpilo visited Tartu to learn from the eye-tracking experiment of various street environments, and Age Poom participated in the kick-off of the ERC project GREENTRAVEL as a scientific advisory board member. The crown of the collaboration were the PhD defenses at the University of Helsinki, first by Elias Willberg, supervised by Tuuli Toivonen, Henrikki Tenkanen and Age Poom, and then by Kerli Müürisepp, who had been an active Mobility Lab member during her BSc and MSc studies and whose PhD thesis was supervised by Olle Järv, Tuuli Toivonen and Tiit Tammaru.
Our traditional events brought members together in more informal settings. At the Vaaba summer seminar in August, this year’s guest was Professor of Experimental Psychology Kairi Kreegipuu, with whom we share strong research interest in environmental exposure research from the lenses of human perception. Apart from the guest seminar and team discussions, the summer seminar traditionally included sessions of farm work, barbecue, sauna, swimming, and the celebration of summer birthdays.
In February, we commemorated our dear Rein, in June, we celebrated the end of the successful academic year 2022/2023, in November, we tuned our collaboration skills in an escape room exercise, and in December, we celebrated Christmas in several settings!
Now, it is time to relax and enjoy the holidays. However, we are already excited about the year 2024 and look forward to its new research avenues and, most notably, to the Mobile Tartu 2024 conference. We hope to see all of you there! Call for abstracts is open until 15 Feb 2024.
Photo courtesy in the post: Age Poom, Jürgen Öövel, Andres Tennus, Madli-Johanna Maidla, Silver Gutmann
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.