Clemens Havas

• Salzburg University of Applied Sciences

Background The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) sparked significant health concerns worldwide, prompting policy makers and health care experts to implement nonpharmaceutical public health interventions, such as stay-at-home orders and mask mandates, to slow the spread of the virus. While these interventions proved essential in controlling trans...

Document layout understanding is a field of study that analyzes the spatial arrangement of information in a document hoping to understand its structure and layout. Models such as LayoutLM (and its subsequent iterations) can understand semi-structured documents with SotA results; however, the lack of open semi-structured data is a limitation in itse...

BACKGROUND The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) sparked significant health concerns worldwide, prompting policy makers and health care experts to implement nonpharmaceutical public health interventions, such as stay-at-home orders and mask mandates, to slow the spread of the virus. While these interventions proved essential in controlling trans...

Human-centered applications using wearable sensors in combination with machine learning have received a great deal of attention in the last couple of years. At the same time, wearable sensors have also evolved and are now able to accurately measure physiological signals and are, therefore, suitable for detecting body reactions to stress. The field...

Geo-social media have become an established data source for spatial analysis of geographic and social processes in various fields. However, only a small share of geo-social media data are explicitly georeferenced, which often compromises the reliability of the analysis results by excluding large volumes of data from the analysis. To increase the nu...

The increased use of mobile maps in our highly mobile digital culture has resulted in a large variety of map users and map use situations. For mobile map applications that engage a broad user base and feature diverging map usage contexts, one-size-fits-all map interface designs might result in significant usability tradeoffs. To respond to this cha...

Up-to-date information about an emergency is crucial for effective disaster management. However, severe restrictions impede the creation of spatiotemporal information by current remote sensing-based monitoring systems, especially at the beginning of a disaster. Multiple publications have shown promising results in complementing monitoring systems t...

Mobile map applications are increasingly used in various aspects of our lives, leading to an increase in different map use situations and, therefore, map use contexts. Several empirical usability studies have identified how map design is associated with and impacted by selected map use context attributes. This research seeks to expand on these stud...

In 2015, within the timespan of only a few months, more than a million people made their way from Turkey to Central Europe in the wake of the Syrian civil war. At the time, public authorities and relief organisations struggled with the admission, transfer, care, and accommodation of refugees due to the information gap about ongoing refugee movement...

Geo-social media data are widely used as a data source to model populations and processes in a variety of contexts. However, if the data do not adequately represent the population they are drawn from, analysis results will be biased. Unaddressed, these biases may lead to false interpretations and conclusions. In this paper, we propose a generic met...

Given still-high levels of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) susceptibility and inconsistent transmission-containing strategies, outbreaks have continued to emerge across the United States. Until effective vaccines are widely deployed, curbing COVID-19 will require carefully timed nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). A COVID-19 early warning s...

Urban systems involve a multitude of closely intertwined components, which are more measurable than before due to new sensors, data collection, and spatio-temporal analysis methods. Turning these data into knowledge to facilitate planning efforts in addressing current challenges of urban complex systems requires advanced interdisciplinary analysis...

In the event of a natural disaster, geo-tagged Tweets are an immediate source of information for locating casualties and damages, and for supporting disaster management. Topic modeling can help in detecting disaster-related Tweets in the noisy Twitter stream in an unsupervised manner. However, the results of topic models are difficult to interpret...

Non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) have been crucial in curbing COVID-19 in the United States (US). Consequently, relaxing NPIs through a phased re-opening of the US amid still-high levels of COVID-19 susceptibility could lead to new epidemic waves. This calls for a COVID-19 early warning system. Here we evaluate multiple digital data streams...

Non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) have been crucial in curbing COVID-19 in the United States (US). Consequently, relaxing NPIs through a phased re-opening of the US amid still-high levels of COVID-19 susceptibility could lead to new epidemic waves. This calls for a COVID-19 early warning system. Here we evaluate multiple digital data streams...

The dynamic nature of cities, understood as complex systems with a variety of concurring factors, poses significant challenges to urban analysis for supporting planning processes. This particularly applies to large urban events because their characteristics often contradict daily planning routines. Due to the availability of large amounts of data,...

In the first hours of a disaster, up-to-date information about the area of interest is crucial for effective disaster management. However, due to the delay induced by collecting and analysing satellite imagery, disaster management systems like the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (EMS) are currently not able to provide information products u...

Current disaster management procedures to cope with human and economic losses and to manage a disaster’s aftermath suffer from a number of shortcomings like high temporal lags or limited temporal and spatial resolution. This paper presents an approach to analyze social media posts to assess the footprint of and the damage caused by natural disaster...