DTU student wins prestigious science award

Video project documents the use of smart phones to track how humans gather

Ulf Aslak Jensen, a digital media student from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) was among the winners of the scientific journal Science’s 2016 Data Stories video competition, which portrays visual stories based on scientific data.

Jensen’s video, titled ‘How People Gather: An Interactive Visualization Approach’, won in the ‘student’ category for his video documenting the use of mobile phones to track human behaviour and how they gather.

“This submission is an engaging merger of video and motion graphics. The added value of the interactive visualisation to describe social interaction makes this piece a fascinating proposition,” Science wrote.

“The intent of this contest was to encourage and recognize compelling visual representations of scientific data. Many entries took a creative approach to conveying complex information in video format within the restricted 90-second time-frame.”

READ MORE: Danish researchers nominated for invention award

Tracking DTU students
The video (below in English) revealed how students at DTU move about and gather in social groups by tracking 1,000 smart phones handed out 2.5 years earlier.

Jensen said that the project aimed to come up with a better way to visualise networks which change over time.

“I used bluetooth-data from Sensible DTU, which can show how students at DTU move around during the week,” said Jensen.

“For instance, you can clearly see who they meet in specific groups for lectures in the morning. These groups disperse around lunch time and new groups are created, which are then again dispersed before their next lectures.”

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