Haosheng Huang

• Professor
• Professor at Ghent University

GPS-based pedestrian navigation systems have become increasingly popular. Different interface technologies can be used to communicate/convey route directions to pedestrians. This paper aims to empirically study the influence of different interface technologies on spatial knowledge acquisition in the context of GPS-based pedestrian navigation. A fie...

Humans perceive and evaluate environments affectively. Some places are experienced as unsafe, while some others as attractive and interesting. These affective responses to environments influence people’s daily behavior and decision-making in space, e.g., choosing which route to take, or which place to visit. In this article, we report on a methodol...

Recently, the increasing availability of digital cameras and the rapid advances in social media have led to the accumulation of a large number of geotagged photos, which may reflect people’s travel experiences in different cities and can be used to generate location recommendations for tourists. Research on this aspect mainly focused on providing p...

We are now living in a mobile information era, which is fundamentally changing science and society. Location Based Services (LBS), which deliver information depending on the location of the (mobile) device and user, play a key role in this mobile information era. This article first reviews the ongoing evolution and research trends of the scientific...

Increasing mobility demands raise the pressure on existing transport networks. As the most used mode of transport, private cars have a particularly strong environmental impact and produce congestion. Ridesharing or carpooling, where a driver and several riders form a carpool, can help to address these issues by increasing the number of persons per...

Cycling is a global activity promoting environmental sustainability and health benefits. Many cities have invested in developing dedicated bike paths. Data about these cycleways, often missing in road databases, form the cornerstone of cycling experience assessment and sustainable urban development planning. Street view images (SVIs) provide detail...

This study explores the integration of human decision-making and computational optimization in emergency response system deployment (ERSD), using a novel interactive game-based approach. Players of the interactive game place configurations of ambulance stations (AS) on a map, attempting to maximize ambulance coverage within the area of the map. We...

This paper documents the development of ARGIS: an interactive game that simulates the complexity of optimizing ambulance standpoints based on geospatial data. The ARGIS game serves a dual purpose: it teaches participants the intricacies of geospatial data interpretation and provides a tangible experience to understand the strategic importance of em...

Little is known about crowding perception on events and the link with objective visitor counts and visitor's behavior. This research aims to fill this gap by collecting WiFi sensor counts and comparing them with perception ratings of visitors and police and first aid data of Europe's largest outdoor urban festival: the Ghent festivities. During 48...

Recognizing the activities being performed on a map is crucial for adaptive map design based on user context. Despite eye tracking (ET) demonstrating potential in recognizing map activities and electroencephalography (EEG) measuring map users' cognitive load, no studies have yet combined ET and EEG for recognition of the user's activity on maps. Ou...

People create route descriptions based on their mental maps to provide route guidance, which represents their knowledge of the environment. Recent studies have attempted to model navigation knowledge from human route descriptions to facilitate route communication. However, they mainly focus on outdoor environments and do not address the representat...

The motivation to organize this Special Issue originated from the observation of rapid changes taking place in the domain of geographical information science and systems over the past few decades [...]

Urban land use/land cover (LULC) classification has long been a hotspot for remote sensing applications. With high spatio-temporal resolution and multispectral, the recently launched GF-6 satellite provides ideal open imagery for LULC mapping. In this study, we utilized multitemporal GF-6 images to generate six types of land features, including spe...

Little is known about crowding perception on events and the link with objective visitor counts. This research aims to fill this gap by collecting WiFi sensor counts and comparing them with perception ratings of visitors on Europe's largest outdoor urban festival: the Ghent festivities. During 48 hours visitors were asked to rate the human crowding,...

The Covid-19 pandemic has received immeasurable research attention across various scientific fields. We would argue that viewing Covid-19 through the lens of geography and urban analytics plays an essential role in interdisciplinary endeavors to understand and fight the pandemic. First, geographic location and time are the fundamental elements in t...

The complexity of urban physical environments at road intersections is a primary factor characterizing the difficulty of wayfinding, which is a fundamental spatial activity of human beings in cities. A complex intersection may increase the difficulty of understanding the environment, which may result in incorrect turning decisions and even bring ro...

Dashboards are an increasingly popular form of data visualization. Large, complex, and dynamic mobility data present a number of challenges in dashboard design. The overall aim for dashboard design is to improve information communication and decision making, though big mobility data in particular require considering privacy alongside size and compl...

Buildings are fundamental components of urban areas and they play a vital role in supporting human activities in daily life. Understanding the actual building functions is essential for many urban applications, such as city management, urban planning, and optimization of transportation systems. Existing studies for inferring building functions are...

Understanding human perceptions of public transport (PT) travel is essential for improving PT provision/operation and the travel experiences of PT users, as well as for encouraging more people to use green and sustainable travel to reduce the congestion, air pollution, and energy costs that many urban systems are facing. Based on behavioral experim...

Aim of this study was to test the reliability and validity of the life-space measures and walking speed delivered by the MOBITEC-GP app. Participants underwent several supervised walking speed assessments as well as a 1-week life-space assessment during two assessment sessions 9 days apart. Fifty-seven older adults (47.4% male, mean age= 75.3 (±5.9...

Modelling and forecasting citywide crowd information (e.g., crowd volume of a region, the inflow of crowds into a region, outflow of crowds from a region) at a fine spatio-temporal scale is crucial for urban and transport planning, city management, public safety, and traffic management. However, this is a challenging task due to its complex spatial...

The spatial familiarity of environments is an important high-level user context for location-based services (LBS). Knowing users' familiarity level of environments is helpful for enabling context-aware LBS that can automatically adapt information services according to users' familiarity with the environment. Unlike state-of-the-art studies that use...

Scene complexity refers to the difficulty of human perception and understanding of the specific environment. An environment is complex when it has many parts or components, and those parts or components interrelate with each other in multiple and random ways. People’s daily behaviors and spatial activities are often influenced by such complexity of...

Accessibility equity is a critical factor in developing equitable and sustainable communities. Although numerous studies have analyzed accessibility inequity, few of them examined inter-group and intra-group inequity and made comparisons between private cars and public transit. In this paper, a Gaussian-based Two-step Floating Catchment Area method...

With the prevalence of GPS tracking technologies, car insurance companies have started to adopt usage-based insurance policies, which adapt insurance premiums according to the customers’ driving behavior. Although many risk models for assessing an individual driver’s accident risk based on the history of driving trajectories, driving events, and ex...

Although numerous studies have been conducted to analyze the relationship between public transit accessibility and housing prices, they often assumed a linear relationship. Using a dataset of 196,232 s-hand residential properties in Shanghai (China), this study applies the gradient boosting regression trees (GBRT) method to investigate the complica...

A hierarchical data model is needed in mobile navigation systems to generate route instructions on multiple levels of detail (LODs), thereby adapting to users' various information needs during navigation. In complex multi-storey indoor environments, existing hierarchical data models mainly rely on logical graphs that represent indoor cellular space...

There is growing recognition that the complexity of road intersections within navigation environments is a critical factor of wayfinding. A complex inter-section can increase the difficulty of spatial cognition and environment perception for pedestrians, leading to wrong decision-making and deviated navigation. Existing methods quantify the complex...

In mobile navigation systems, an appropriate level of detail of the route instructions provided is important for navigation users to understand, memorise, and follow routes. However, few existing indoor navigation systems are capable of providing route instructions with multiple levels of detail. To close this gap, it is critical to model indoor en...

The growing ubiquity of location/activity sensing technologies and location-based services (LBS) has led to a large volume and variety of location-based big data (LocBigData), such as location tracking or sensing data, social media data, and crowdsourced geographic information. The increasing availability of such LocBigData has created unprecedente...

Wayfinding has been widely studied in fields of location-based service and geospatial cognition. It is currently unclear how wayfinding behaviour and spatial knowledge acquisition in immersive virtual reality (iVR) differ from those in real-world environments (REs). To investigate this question, we conducted the wayfinding experiment in RE with twe...

State-of-the-art mobile pedestrian navigation systems often employ GPS or other positioning methods for continuous tracking of users, and thus provide them with in-situ turn-by-turn route guidance along a desired route. However, studies have shown that user experience and acquisition of spatial knowledge decrease due to the “blind” following of suc...

For human-centered mobile navigation systems, a computational landmark selection model is critical to automatically include landmarks for communicating routes with users. Although some empirical studies have shown that landmarks selected by familiar and unfamiliar wayfinders, respectively, differ significantly, existing computational models are sol...

When conveying information about routes to follow in complex environments, human route-givers adapt to route-receivers’ familiarity with the environments in their choice of landmarks. Meanwhile, as route-givers themselves have experienced the environments within a social role, the landmarks they select may also differ significantly. This research i...

In light of growing urban traffic, car parking becomes increasingly critical for cities to manage. As a result, the prediction of parking occupancy has sparked significant research interest in recent years. While many external data sources have been considered in the prediction models, the underlying geographic context has mostly been ignored. Thus...

Landmarks play key roles in human wayfinding and mobile navigation systems. Existing computational landmark selection models mainly focus on outdoor environments, and aim to identify suitable landmarks for guiding users who are unfamiliar with a particular environment, and fail to consider familiar users. This study proposes a familiarity-dependent...

Visual analytics science develops principles and methods for efficient human–computer collaboration in solving complex problems. Visual and interactive techniques are used to create conditions in which human analysts can effectively utilize their unique capabilities: the power of seeing, interpreting, linking, and reasoning. Visual analytics resear...

For human-centered mobile navigation systems, a computational landmark selection model is critical to automatically include landmarks for communicating routes with users. Although some empirical studies have shown that landmarks selected by familiar and unfamiliar wayfinders, respectively, differ significantly, existing computational models are sol...

Digital billboards, as a new form of outdoor advertising, has gained popularity in recent years per its revolutionized way to control when and where the specific ads appear. However, this development also demands more complicated optimization for strategic deployments: the advertisers have to not only decide on a set of locations to display their a...

Big GPS trajectory datasets can have redundant spatio-temporal information for applications, which requires simplification as a key preprocessing for modeling. Many existing simplification methods focus on the geometric information from a trajectory per se. Conversely, methods considering geographic context often fail to provide spatially adaptive...

Background: Mobility limitations in older adults are associated with poor clinical outcomes including higher mortality and disability rates. A decline in mobility (including physical function and life-space) is detectable and should be discovered as early as possible, as it can still be stabilized or even reversed in early stages by targeted inter...

Due to the ubiquity of mobile phones, mobile phone network data (e.g., Call Detail Records, CDR; and cellular signaling data, CSD), which are collected by mobile telecommunication operators for maintenance purposes, allow us to potentially study travel behaviors of a high percentage of the whole population, with full temporal coverage at a comparat...

We are now living in a mobile information era, which is fundamentally changing science and society. Location Based Services (LBS), which deliver information depending on the location of the (mobile) device and user, play a key role in this mobile information era. This presentation will review the state-of-the-art in LBS research, and identify sever...

Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of navigation systems. They gradually become the default way of navigating in our daily life. Despite benefiting from their convenience, we may be negatively influenced by them (Parush et al. 2007). Current navigation systems usually draw too much of users' attention to the mobile devices, which lea...

The characteristics of a smartwatch impose several challenges regardig the design of a pedestrian navigation aid. This paper illustrates how landmark-based pedestrian navigation systems for smartwatches can be developed, considering the small screen sizes as well as the very limited interaction capacities of these wrist-worn devices. Particularly,...

This paper raises a number of open research challenges with respect to the theme "User Experience Design for Location Based Services (LBS)", namely "context-aware user interfaces", "collaborative user interfaces", "cross-device interaction", "cognitive implications of mobile user interfaces", and "social and ethical issues". We formulate important...

Background: Physical activity (PA) is paramount for human health and well-being. However, there is a lack of information regarding the types of PA and the way they can exert an influence on functional and mental health as well as quality of life. Studies have measured and classified PA type in controlled conditions, but only provided limited insigh...

The rapid development in telecommunication networks is producing a huge amount of information regarding how people (with their mobile devices) move and behave over space and time. While GPS data, typically collected by smartphone apps, are restricted to rather small samples of the population, mobile phone network data, routinely collected by mobile...

With the development of modern geovisual analytics tools, several researchers have emphasized the importance of understanding users' cognitive, perceptual, and affective tendencies for supporting spatial decisions with geographic information displays (GIDs). However, most recent technological developments have focused on support for navigation in t...

With the development of modern geovisual analytics tools, several researchers have emphasized the importance of understanding users’ cognitive, perceptual, and affective tendencies for supporting spatial decisions with geographic information displays (GIDs). However, most recent technological developments have focused on support for navigation in t...

From location-based social media platforms or tracking data devices, disaggregated data are available at high spatial and temporal granularities. Such data constitute an important type of emerging geospatial big data which significantly differ from conventional small data in at least three aspects: sampled versus all, estimated versus measured, agg...

The increasing use of location-based services, as well as the growing ubiquity of location/activity sensing technologies have led to a huge amount of location-based big data (LocBigData), such as tracking or sensing data (e.g., massive GPS trajectories of people and vehicles, and georeferenced mobile phone data), social media data (e.g., twitter),...

Eye movement data convey a wealth of information that can be used to probe human behaviour and cognitive processes. To date, eye tracking studies have mainly focused on laboratory-based evalua- tions of cartographic interfaces; in contrast, little attention has been paid to eye movement data mining for real-world applications. In this study, we pro...

A physically active lifestyle is a key component of promoting health and well-being particularly for healthy ageing. Most sensor-based studies are focused on measuring the level (or intensity) of physical activity and use data collected using a specific study protocol under a controlled laboratory condition and are thus hardly comparable to each ot...

Location-based services (LBS) are a growing area of research. This editorial paper introduces the key research areas within the scientific field of LBS, which consist of positioning, modelling, communication, applications, evaluation, analysis of LBS data, and privacy and ethical issues. After that, 18 original papers are presented, which provide a...

Location-Based Services (LBS) are mobile applications that provide information depending on the location of the user. To make LBS work, different system components are needed, i.e., mobile devices, positioning, communication networks, and service and content provider. Almost every LBS application needs several key elements to handle the main tasks...

The surface roughness of roads is an essential road characteristic. Due to the employed carrying platforms (which are often cars), existing measuring methods can only be used for motorable roads. Until now, there has been no effective method for measuring the surface roughness of un-motorable roads, such as pedestrian and bicycle lanes. This hinder...

Tailored routing and navigation services utilized by wheelchair users require certain information about sidewalk geometries and their attributes to execute efficiently. Except some minor regions/cities, such detailed information is not present in current versions of crowdsourced mapping databases including OpenStreetMap. CAP4Access European project...

Existing indoor navigational aids such as signs and floor plans are originally designed to assist navigation and to support spatial learning. However, they are often neglected in current navigation services. Integrating such information adequately into indoor navigation services requires a better understanding of their usages. Thus, we conducted an...

Since OpenStreetMap (OSM) appeared more than ten years ago, new collaborative mapping approaches have emerged in different areas and have become important components of localised information and services based on localisation. There is now increased awareness of the importance of the space-time attributes of almost every event and phenomenon. Citiz...

This book gathers a selection of the best papers presented during the 14th International Conference on Location Based Services, which was held in Zurich (Switzerland) between the 15th and 17th January 2018. It presents a general overview of recent research activities related to location based services. Such activities have grown in importance over...

Emotions have a spatial and relational character: they are a means to understanding practices and interpretations of the surrounding environment. Indeed, humans perceive and evaluate environments emotionally: some places are experienced as risky or desolate, while others as attractive and exciting. The paper aims to study people's affective respons...

Existing indoor navigational aids such as signs and floor plans are originally designed to assist navigation and to support spatial learning. However, they are often neglected in current navigation services. Integrating such information adequately into indoor navigation services requires a better understanding of their usages. Thus, we conducted an...

People in unfamiliar environments often need navigation guidance to reach a destination. Research has found that compared to outdoors, people tend to lose orientation much more easily within complex buildings, such as university buildings and hospitals. This paper proposes a category-based method to generate landmark-based route instructions to sup...

The explosion of map use in the past few decades as part of everyday activities, accelerated through the digital production and dissemination of maps and the availability of low-cost, location-aware devices, has made the job of cartographers and map display designers more challenging. Yet, how do these recent changes affect effective map design? Ca...

This book focuses on the study of the remarkable new source of geographic information that has become available in the form of usergenerated content accessible over the Internet through mobile and Web applications. The exploitation, integration and application of these sources, termed volunteered geographic information (VGI) or crowdsourced geograp...

This book offers a selection of the best papers presented at the 13th International Symposium on Location Based Services (LBS 2016), which was held in Vienna (Austria) from November 14 to 16, 2016. It provides an overview of recent research in the field, including the latest advances in outdoor/indoor positioning, smart environment, spatial modelin...

This book gathers the latest developments in modern cartography, ranging from the innovative approaches being pursued at national mapping agencies and topographic mapping, to new trends in the fields of Atlas Cartography, Cartographic Modelling, Multimedia Cartography, Historical Cartography and Cartographic Education. Europe can look back on a lon...

When travelling in space, humans perceive the environment and evaluate it affectively. This chapter illustrates how mobile crowdsourcing and social media data can be used to study people’s affective responses to different environments. It also showcases how these affective responses can be used to provide a better understanding of human?environment...

Increasing availability of Geo-Social Media (e.g. Facebook, Foursquare and Flickr) has led to the accumulation of large volumes of social media data. These data, especially geotagged ones, contain information about perception of and experiences in various environments. Harnessing these data can be used to provide a better understanding of the seman...

This book presents a general picture of recent research activities related to location-based services. Such activities emerged in the last years especially concerning issues of outdoor/indoor positioning, smart environment, spatial modelling, personalization and context-awareness, cartographic communication, novel user interfaces, crowdsourcing, so...

Compared to vehicle trajectories that are solely generated from outdoor environments, most pedestrian GPS trajectories are recorded in mixed indoor and outdoor environments. Due to the problems of poor indoor accuracy and sparseness of signal points, processing of indoor GPS trajectories is significantly different from that of outdoor GPS data. Exi...

A number of studies in the field of environmental psychology show that humans perceive and evaluate their surroundings affectively. Some places are experienced as unsafe, while some others as attractive and interesting. Experiences from daily life show that many of our daily behaviours and decision-making are often influenced by this kind of affect...