Maturepolis Lab

Congratulations to Anna Joya, our guest at the lab for the KAIST High School Research Program. Anna received a Graduation Research Prize for her senior project on bicycle network access in Daejeon, which she completed at the lab with much support from Wonjun. Anna was also just accepted into KAIST and will be joining as an undergraduate majoring in civil and environmental engineering.

2021-02-22

Two more recently published articles from our lab: - Analysis of Vehicle–Pedestrian Interactive Behaviors near Unsignalized Crosswalk: a culmination of our ongoing project detecting vehicle-pedestrian collision risk from analyzing video footage. Published in Transportation Research Record, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0361198121999066 - Urban Informatics in Sustainable Waste Management: A Spatial Analysis of Korea’s Informal Recycling Networks: a first-ever quantitative study of informal recycling industry in Korea, which is omnipresent and critical to sustainable waste management, yet rarely acknowledged. Published in Sustainability, https://doi.org/10.3390/su13063076

2020-12-01

We published an article on South Korea's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the earliest reports chronicling the Korean government's response to the virus. We noted the importance of technology and design in detecting and containing the virus' spread through personal travel, including pop-up testing sites, automated contact tracing, and digital mapping.

2020-05-01

David received an "Outstanding prize for Learning & Teaching Innovation Award" from KAIST, for his teaching activity in 2019. Thanks to everyone who gave their support, and our awesome TA, Wonjun No, for making it happen!

2020-04-13

Our article on applying computer vision to assessing risky driver behavior at crosswalks was published in the journal Applied Sciences. We used CV to process hundreds of driver-pedestrian interactions at two crosswalks in Osan, South Korea, extracted behavioral features like velocity, acceleration, and separation, and used k-means clustering to categorize them and interpret their risk. Congrats to Byeongjoon Noh, who led this project and will apply it to his PhD thesis.

2020-02-05

Congratulations to Wonjun No for successfully defending his masters thesis, on the impact of crosswalk signal timing on walksheds and accessibility from Seoul public schools. On to the PhD!

2019-12-17

Wonjun and Junyong both won prizes at the KAIST CEE Smart City competition (PhD division) for their proposals on detecting unsafe road crossings and studying gentrification using taxi ridership data.

2019-12-06

It was a full house for our guest speaker, Chaewon Ahn from MIT DUSP, who presented work she has done on activity sensing in public space, detecting ghost cities in China using social media data, and analyzing the strong and weak social ties that bind together the many small-scale industries of the Euljiro area of Seoul. Thanks Chaewon for the fantastic seminar!

2019-12-02

Chanho presented his idea for improving the air quality in the city using Big-data and GIS at the KAIST CEE Smart City competition. He was awarded a silver prize. Congrats!

2019-11-29

We traveled to Hanoi and met with our collaborators, Cuong Pham and Nam Vu, with whom we are developing techniques to assess traffic congestion from a short drone flyover, to help guide emergency vehicles on dispatch.

2019-11-16

David presented at the 2019 Seoul Big Data Forum, on the lab's work in studying street safety through data analysis.

2019-11-07

A shot of the beautiful Falls on the Reedy park in Greenville, South Carolina, where we presented our research (co-authored with Prof Karl Kim of University of Hawaii, Manoa) at the ACSP annual conference.

2019-10-24

Wonjun delivered a fantastic presentation at Seoul Mapo district on our research on school location and social infrastructure. We received great feedback from the panel of stakeholders on what is important for students to have walkable access to near their schools, and will present a final report to the city by end of the year.

2019-10-22

We delivered our findings to an Urban Land Institute (ULI) advisory panel on the future revitalization of the Sewoon Sangga district in Seoul. We hope that this information helps inform stakeholders of the importance of that cluster of small-scale machining, electronics, and wholesale industries to the innovative capacity of the city.

2019-10-15

Jaehong and Chanho attended the FOSS4G Korea annual workshop in Busan, to learn more about open-source GIS and drone mapping technologies.

2019-10-10

We were happy to introduce Grace Simrall, Chief of Civic Innovation and Technology for the Louisville Metro Government, for her seminar with the department on her city's approach to civic tech. Especially impressed with their work on measuring air pollution exposure by tracking the location and timing of inhaler use by residents.

2019-10-02

Zurich meets Seoul! We participated in a workshop organized by the Swiss Embassy in Seoul, on re-thinking cities in the age of responsive technologies. Along with colleagues from ETH Zurich's Future Cities Laboratory, David ran a discussion group on civic tech and citizen design science, identifying several research questions important to both Korea and Switzerland in supporting more inclusive civic life.

2019-10-01

David presented a paper (co-authored with Seolha Lee) on the diverging online search patterns of different age groups, and what that reveals about neighborhood character, at PURBA 2019 (part of Ubicomp 2019) in London. It was selected as best paper of the workshop!

2019-09-09

Welcome to Korea, Hans! We met with the Mapo district office in Seoul to discuss our ongoing research on school location and social infrastructure.

2019-09-06

Wonjun and Junyong spent the day at the World Smart City Expo in Ilsan, Korea. They spoke with companies working on sensors for detecting urban air pollution, senior health, and shared mobility.

2019-09-05

Junyong, Yeji, and Minchul won a preliminary startup funding package (예비창업패키지) funded by government of Korea. They will work on a smart sun shade that adjusts itself to the path of the sun, and gathers surrounding urban information.

2019-09-03

NJ Namju Lee from ESRI gave a seminar at KAIST on computational design, data-driven decision-making, and visualization, as a guest of the lab.

2019-08-26

David and Ryan Ramelo presented their paper on the effect of lighting on the walking speed of elderly pedestrians crossing roads, at the 15th International Congress of Asian Planning Schools Association in Seoul, Korea.

2019-08-23

We are partnering with the Mapo district of Seoul to study walkability and accessibility around its public school campuses. In our last visit, we also got to see their air-filtering bench deployed at the district office.

2019-08-23

Lab outing to cheer on the home team Daejeon Citizen FC, on a lovely summer night!

2019-08-19

David participated in a panel discussion on the past and future development of Suwon, Korea, at an international symposium of the 70th anniversary of the city's founding.

2019-08-14

Wonjun No presented his paper on how crosswalk signal times affects the walkability of Seoul neighborhoods at CUPUM (International Conference on Computers in Urban Planning and Urban Management) in Wuhan, China.

2019-07-10

Michael Chen, PhD., gave a seminar at KAIST on his dissertation work on soil contamination from inorganic metals, as a guest of the lab.

2019-06-17

We have received a KAIST Global Initiative grant, in partnership with Prof Jong-in Han and Prof Martin Ziegler, to design and test a system to reduce the exposure of urban populations to particulate matter pollution at the street level.

2019-06-11

Assembling AI Vision Kits in the lab.

2019-05-24

Our lab, as part of a consortium of university, public, and private research labs, has received a 5-year grant from KAIA (Korea Agency for Infrastructure Technology Advancement) to develop technologies for urban resilience to disasters, natural and man-made.

2019-05-03

Jaehong Lee presented his paper on mapping the location patterns of informal recycling junkshops in Seoul at the Urban Affairs Association annual conference at UCLA.

2019-04-25

The fruits of our labor! Screenshots of OpenStreetMap before and after our Technology and the Smart City students canvassed an unmapped Daejeon neighborhood.

2019-04-11

Enjoying a strawberry picnic under cherry blossoms at the end of a fieldwork exercise with our Technology and the Smart City class.

2019-04-04

Professor Donyun Kim from Sunkyunkwan University gave a seminar at KAIST, reflecting on his work developing Seoul's Digital Media City neighborhood, as a guest of the lab.

2019-04-02

Professor Jaemin Lee from University of Ulsan gave a seminar at KAIST, on using cameras and observations to study public life in a Philadelphia park, as a guest of the lab.

2019-03-12

David gave a lecture at the Institute for Basic Science (in Daejeon, Korea) on use of GIS in research and urban planning.

2019-03-08

David presented the lab's work on technology and safer streets at the Gwangju Urban Design Forum, and stayed to mentor student teams in the International Youth Camp on urban design projects.

2018-11-29

Jaehong Lee and Wonjun No both presented papers at the 31st KKHTCNN Symposium on Civil Engineering, in Kyoto, Japan. Jaehong showed some preliminary studies on informal waste recycling in Korea, while Wonjun presented his work on detecting braille blocks from streetview images.

2018-11-23

David presented the lab's work on pedestrian safety at the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Singapore, and ran into some old friends as well!

2018-10-11

David gave a talk at the Smart Waterfront City Forum, hosted by K-Water as part of the World Smart City Week conference held at KINTEX.

2018-09-19

Byeongjoon Noh and David Lee will be at PURBA 2018 (part of Ubicomp 2018) to present a paper: Vision-based Overhead Front Point Recognition of Vehicles for Traffic Safety Analysis. We will talk about some of the techniques we use to identify the precise locations of vehicles detected from stationary cameras over a crosswalk, in order to detect when these vehicles might be a potential collision risk to the pedestrians using the crossing. See you in Singapore!

2018-09-05

Professor Myounggu Kang from University of Seoul gave a seminar at KAIST on smart urban planning, as a guest of the lab.

2018-08-28

David gave a talk at Claremont Graduate University, graciously hosted by Professor Joshua Tasoff and the Department of Economics.

2018-06-28

A spicy goodbye lunch for our departing visiting student, Hou Yudi.

2018-06-14

Catching up with Hongik urban design professor Jae Seung Lee after giving a talk at Sogang University Art+Design.

2018-05-30

Lab outing to see the Doosan Bears take on the home team Hanhwa Eagles!

2018-05-24

Information designer and AI specialist Sey Min gave a seminar at KAIST on data visualization, as a guest of the lab.

2018-05-01

We brought students from our Technology and the Smart City course to Seoul to meet with our partner course at IDAS@Hongik, and study some sites in the Dongdaemun area.

2018-04-28