Wirz, Martin

Martin Wirz studied Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at ETH Zurich. He focused on Ubiquitous Computing and Mobile Communication. In 2008, he finalized his studies with his Master’s thesis „Mobile Social Networking for Enhanced Group Communication“ conducted at Swisscom Strategy & Innovation.

In January 2009, he started his PhD in the Wearable Group at the Electronics Laboratory.

Research Interests

I am involved in the FP7 SOCIONICAL project with the title Complex Socio-Technical System in Ambient Intelligence. My main research focus lies on understanding how mobile technology can be used for crowd management in urban settings for emergency response & crisis management.

I am the project leader of the CoenoSense (www.coenosense.com) platform. The CoenoSense platform allows to aquire, process and visualize context, activity and location information from potentially hundres of mobile devices simultaneously. The platform can be used for real-time human behavior studies, large-scale urban space monitoring and helps to gain novel insight into social dynamics. CoenoSense has already been used during several city-wide mass gatherings for real-time crowd management.

Visualization of crowd dynamics during city-wide mass gatherings

We have been using CoenoSense to collect GPS location updates from mobile phones of hundreds of visitors of mass-gatherings. This information was used to obtain a crowd density estimation which was visualized and made available in real-time to event organizers and security personnel.

A report about earlier work and my vision can be found in the ETH Life article Das Handy als Lebensretter.

Einstein TV Report from 30.09.2010

Research Interest Keywords

• Crowd Sensing
• Collective Behavior Sensing
• Reality Mining
• Social Computing
• Social Network Analysis

Publications

2012

• Inferring and visualizing crowd conditions by collecting GPS location traces from pedestrians' mobile phones for real-time crowd monitoring during city-scale mass gatherings
  Martin Wirz, Tobias Franke, Daniel Roggen, Eve Mitleton-Kelly, Paul Lukowicz and Gerhard Tröster
  in: Collaborative Technology for Coordinating Crisis Management (CT2CM) track of WETICE-2012, 2012
  [ BiBTeX RIS ]
• Mobile Sensing of Pedestrian Flocks in Indoor Environments using WiFi Signals
  Mikkel Baun Kjærgaard, Martin Wirz, Daniel Roggen and Gerhard Tröster
  in: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, 2012
  [ BiBTeX RIS ]

2011

• Real-time Detection and Recommendation of Thermal Spots by Sensing Collective Behaviors in Paragliding
  Martin Wirz, Christina Strohrmann, Roman Patscheider, Fabian Hilti, Bernhard Gahr, Frederik Hess, Daniel Roggen and Gerhard Tröster
  in: Proceedings of the 1st International Symposium on Social and Community Intelligence, 2011
  [ BiBTeX RIS ]
• Recognition of Crowd Behavior from Mobile Sensors with Pattern Analysis and Graph Clustering Methods
  Daniel Roggen, Martin Wirz, Dirk Helbing and Gerhard Tröster
  (2011), in: Networks and Heterogeneous Media
  [ BiBTeX RIS ]
• Sensing Dance Engagement for Collaborative Music Control
  Michael Kuhn, Martin Wirz, Matthias Flückiger, Roger Wattenhofer and Gerhard Tröster
  in: Proceedings of the 14th IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC 2011), IEEE Computer Society, 2011
  [ BiBTeX RIS ]
• Towards an online detection of pedestrian flocks in urban canyons by smoothed spatio-temporal clustering of GPS trajectories
  Martin Wirz, Mikkel Baun Kjaergaard, Sebastian Feese, Pablo Schläpfer, Daniel Roggen and G. Tröster
  in: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop onLocation-Based Social Networks (LBSN 2011), 2011
  [ BiBTeX RIS ]
• Towards Collision Avoidance on Ski Slopes
  Thomas Holleczek, Martin Wirz and Gerhard Tröster
  in: Proceedings of the 19th International Congress on Ski Trauma and Skiing Safety (ISSS 2011), Keystone, Colorado, USA, 2011
  [ BiBTeX RIS ]

2010

• A Methodology towards the Detection of Collective Behavior Patterns by Means of Body-Worn Sensors
  Martin Wirz, Daniel Roggen and Gerhard Tröster
  in: Workshop at the 8th International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive 2010), 2010
  [ BiBTeX RIS PDF ]
• A wearable, ambient sound-based approach for infrastructureless fuzzy proximity estimation
  Martin Wirz, Daniel Roggen and Gerhard Tröster
  in: Proceedings of the 14th IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC 2010), IEEE Computer Society, 2010
  [ BiBTeX RIS ]
• Collective behavior sensing: a research field in need of ultra-low-cost wearable sensor nodes
  Daniel Roggen, Martin Wirz and Gerhard Tröster
  ULC-WSN: Workshop on Ultra-Low-Cost Wireless Sensor Networks and their Applications at the INSS'10, 2010
  [ BiBTeX RIS PDF ]
• Pervasive Computing in the Large: The SOCIONICAL Approach
  Kashif Zia, Alois Ferscha, Andreas Riener, Martin Wirz, Daniel Roggen, Kamil Kloch and Paul Lukowicz
  in: Workshop at the 8th International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive 2010), 2010
  [ BiBTeX RIS ]
• Scenario Based Modeling for Very Large Scale Simulations
  Kashif Zia, Alois Ferscha, Andreas Riener, Martin Wirz, Daniel Roggen, Kamil Kloch and Paul Lukowicz
  (2010), in: Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications, IEEE/ACM International Symposium on
  [ BiBTeX RIS DOI ]
• User acceptance study of a mobile system for assistance during emergency situations at large-scale events
  Martin Wirz, Daniel Roggen and Gerhard Tröster
  in: The 3rd International Conference on Human-centric Computing, 2010
  [ BiBTeX RIS ]

2009

• Cluestr: mobile social networking for enhanced group communication
  Reto Grob, Michael Kuhn, Roger Wattenhofer and Martin Wirz
  in: Proceedings of the ACM 2009 international conference on Supporting group work, ACM New York, NY, USA, pages 81-90, 2009
  [ BiBTeX RIS ]
• Decentralized Detection of Group Formations from Wearable Acceleration Sensors
  Martin Wirz, Daniel Roggen and Gerhard Tröster
  in: Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Social Computing, pages IEEE Press, 2009
  [ BiBTeX RIS ]

2007

• Automatic Artefact Compensation in EOG Signals
  Andreas Bulling, Philip Herter, Martin Wirz and Gerhard Tröster
  in: Adj. Proc. of the 2nd European Conference on Smart Sensing and Context (EuroSSC 2007), pages 12-13, 2007
  [ BiBTeX RIS ]

Education

Supervisor for the Digitaltechnik course taught by Prof. Tröster.
If you have any question concerning this course, you can write my an e-mail or visit me in my office.