Monthly Archives: October 2021

NERDS at CRBAM21 cycling research conference

This year’s Cycling Research Board Annual Meeting, the premier CRBAM21 conference on cycling research, will be held in Copenhagen this week, Oct 13-15, and 3 of us will present our research (of course attending via bicycle). Click the talk titles below for the abstracts of our three current members, Anastassia Vybornova, Bojan Kostic, and Michael Szell, and of our future member Ane Rahbek Vierø:

Anastassia Vybornova
Network algorithms for the identification and classification of gaps in urban bicycle networks based on OSM data
Oct 15, 10:40, Session 2.5: Bicycle network analysis

Bojan Kostic
Analysing cyclist behavior at signalized intersections using computer vision
Oct 14, 15:30, Session 2.4: Modelling bicycle traffic

Michael Szell
The geometric limits of growing urban bicycle networks
Oct 15, 11:00, Session 2.5: Bicycle network analysis

Ane Rahbek Vierø (currently at Aalborg University)
Cyclists’ access to everyday amenities
Oct 15, 10:00, Session 2.5: Bicycle network analysis


See here for the full program: https://cyclingresearchboard.com/2021/?page_id=1433
The conference will also feature an exciting panel of the “who is who” in cycling research and policy:

We are looking forward to the conference and to seeing you at #CRBAM21!

The unsung heroes of NERDS

Our research group has recently grown to a milestone of 10 members, however this number does not give the full picture of NERDS. There are several short-term members and visitors that make our group and its activities more lively, and whose hard work allow our research to fully prosper. Further, now that Corona is kind-of-resolved in Denmark, we want to increase liveliness even more by re-booting our hospitality towards research visitors: If you are interested in visiting us in Copenhagen, for scientific exchange and/or a seminar/talk, please reach out to us.

To shine more light onto our “unsung heros”, here an overview of our past and current NERDS-embedded colleagues, helpers, and friends, apart from the yearly one to two dozen Bachelor and Master students who we supervise:

Victor Møller Poulsen, Intern (2021-08 to 2022-01)
Marilena Hohmann, Intern (2021-08 to 2022-01)
Lasse Buschmann Alsbrik, Research assistant (2021-08 to 2021-10)
Morten Lynghede, Student programmer (2021-06)
Cecilia Laura Kolding Andersen, Student programmer (2021-06)

We have updated our people page accordingly.

Anastassia Vybornova has joined NERDS

We are excited to welcome Anastassia Vybornova to our research group!

Anastassia joins us as PhD student from Vienna, Austria. She recently completed her Master degree jointly supervised at KU, BOKU Vienna, and at ITU by Michael Szell, accomplishing an outstanding thesis on Identifying and classifying gaps in the bicycle network of Copenhagen. She has won a competitive, ITU-supported PhD grant and will therefore be with us for (at least) 3 years. 

Anastassia’s background is a crazy mix of physics, environmental science, and transcultural communication, and she is educated in complex systems and network science – all of which makes her fit perfectly into NERDS.

Her PhD topic at NERDS will be Network analysis of urban transport networks: for a green transition from car-centricity to cycling, with Michael Szell as supervisor, for which her ideal combination of skills from physics, sustainability science, and programming will be indispensable. To taste an hors d’oeuvre of her work, see her talk in two weeks at CRBAM.

Yanmeng Xing has joined NERDS

We are thrilled to welcome Yanmeng Xing to our research group!

Yanmeng joins us as a visiting PhD Student for one year. Yanmeng is a PhD student in Complexity Science at Beijing Normal University who won a prestigious Chinese fellowship to spend one year abroad.

At NERDS he will be working on Science of Science topics, specifically investigating the effects of the pandemic on scientific collaborations and career dynamics.