What a great achievement for our former study assistent, Elena Gaus, who received this year’s student award at the “GI Runde” (a two-day event for networking in the GIS community) at Technical University Munich. With her master thesis „Evaluation and representation of the risk of intersections for cyclists at lane level – A Geospatial Approach“ Elena convinced the expert jury and the audience. The award, which comes with a check for 1,500 €, was handed over to Elena during the conference dinner in the cozy Augustinerkeller brewery.

In her master thesis, which is available on GitHub, Elena developed an innovative, automatized workflow for generating a polygonal representation of the road space from a network graph. Based on this, she designed a comprehensive asssessment model with a focus on cycling safety. This model was then successfully applied on intersections of any network. Elena’s master thesis was embedded into a large, nationally funded research project (Bike2CAV), in which we investigated opportunities to ensure safety for vulnerable road users in connected transport systems.

Research-based teaching is a frequently propagated ideal, which is hardly ever turned into practice. We are therefore all the more pleased that our efforts to integrate students in academic research projects and let them participate in knowledge production, together with Elena’s excellent work got awarded. Congratulations, dear Elena, and all the best for your future career.