Manuel BaerUniversity of Zurich | UZH · Department of Geography
Manuel Baer
Master of Science
About
6
Publications
1,109
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8
Citations
Introduction
How individuals and groups of individuals perceive and interact with landscapes has enjoyed a long history of research in cognitive, geographic and linguistic sciences. Understanding how persons experience their environment has been an especially prominent field of research due to the importance of the topic for policy and decision-making purposes. The main aim of my PhD is to develop an application to actively collect and analyse landscape perception data using a gamified approach (e.g. using entertaining elements as a primary form of motivation). We will collect in-situ natural language descriptions along with photographs as the literature has identified the use of texts as viable underlying datasets to gage individual perceptions and sentiments.
Additional affiliations
June 2018 - present
Position
- PhD Student
Description
- I am currently in the process of narrowing in on a suitable PhD topic. The general idea revolves around exploring, implementing and evaluating new methodological approaches of crowdsourcing landscape perception.
June 2017 - June 2018
Position
- Research Assistant
Description
- I worked as a research assistant in the geocomputation unit of the University of Zürich. Tasks involved administrative work, aid in research, writing papers and preparing for a PhD.
Publications
Publications (6)
Visiting landscapes and appreciating them from specific viewpoints is not a new phenomenon. Such so-called motifs were popularised by travel guides and art in the romantic era, and find their contemporary digital twins through images captured in social media. We developed and implemented a conceptual model of motifs, based around spatial clustering...
Social forest functions including recreation are important for increasingly urbanised societies. For effective management of forest recreation areas, monitoring visitor frequencies is crucial. Increasingly, attempts are being made to incorporate recreational use data into National Forest Inventories (NFI), but given the large scale of national asse...
The first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic that affected many cities around the world during the spring and summer 2020 was often met with regulations requiring people to lockdown, to quarantine or to respect social distancing. Urban spaces often became off-limits and depopulated, filled with borders isolating people confined at home. Nevertheless, in...
Data contributed by a large number of non‐experts is increasingly used to validate and curate land cover data, with location‐based games (LBGs) developed for this purpose generating particular interest. We here present our findings on StarBorn, a novel LBG with a strong focus on game play. Users conquer game‐tiles by visiting real‐world locations a...
Public transportation is of growing importance in Switzerland. The steady increase of commuters using this mode of transportation has an impact on the infrastructure and characteristics of the public transportation network. Spatiotemporal problems arise which have a negative influence on the client satisfaction. In this paper we analyzed various as...
![Figure 1: Number of monthly searches worldwide, in billions. Source: [1]](profile/Manuel-Baer/publication/315770646/figure/fig1/AS:479396889927681@1491308533655/Number-of-monthly-searches-worldwide-in-billions-Source-1_Q320.jpg)
![Figure 4: Neo4J database structure. Source: [32]](profile/Manuel-Baer/publication/315770646/figure/fig5/AS:479396889927685@1491308533796/Neo4J-database-structure-Source-32_Q320.jpg)
![Figure 5: Gazetteer conceptual schema. Source: [18]](profile/Manuel-Baer/publication/315770646/figure/fig4/AS:479396889927684@1491308533738/Gazetteer-conceptual-schema-Source-18_Q320.jpg)
In this paper, I describe the state of the art in geographic information retrieval (GIR) and present a conceptual model for a fast, scalable graph based gazetteer, to be used in various domains of geographic information retrieval. The majority of available gazetteers are stored as relational databases, providing easy access but limiting the complex...
Projects
Projects (2)
Developing and implementing a location based game (LBG) to generate real-time landscape data. The goal is to use entertainment as a motivational element to incentivise users to generate data about their in-situ environment and how they experience these. The data will be analysed to gauge how different people perceive varying landscapes.
Technologies:
- Unity3D
- Mapbox SDK
- Android SDK
- IOS SDK
- Blender
- Photoshop / Gimp
- NodeJS
- WebSockets / Socket.IO
- MongoDB
- Postgres / PostGIS
