Rein Ahas Lecture
The Rein Ahas Lecture series is dedicated to the memory and academic legacy of Prof. Rein Ahas (December 10, 1966-February 18, 2018), a visionary scholar and the founder of the Mobility Lab at the University of Tartu. He initiated the Mobile Tartu conference series in 2008 and was the head of the organising committee until 2018. Rein Ahas was a pioneering scholar in mobile phone-based research within the broad fields of geography and social sciences. The Rein Ahas Lecture is one of the keynote speeches at the Mobile Tartu biennial conference, delivered by a person from Rein’s extensive academic network.
Publications by Rein Ahas
Rein Ahas Lecture 2026 will be held by Prof. em. Kay W. Axhausen (ETH Zurich)
Keynote speech “Activity Space from idea to measurement“
Dr. K. W. Axhausen is Professor emeritus of Transport Planning at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich. Before he worked at the Leopold-Franzens Universität, Innsbruck, Imperial College London, and the University of Oxford. Over the past 40 years, he has worked on measuring and modelling movement behaviours, making significant contributions to the scientific literature in areas such as stated preferences, microsimulation of travel behaviour, accessibility, evaluation of travel time and its components, parking behaviour, activity timing, social networks, and the collection of travel diary data, including GPS tracking. His current work focuses on the electric bicycle city project.
Previous keynote speakers delivering Rein Ahas Lecture
Mobile Tartu 2024 – Professor Jukka M. Krisp (Augsburg University)
Keynote speech “Location Based Services – conceptual perspectives for mobility research, navigation and wayfinding“
Prof. Dr. Krisp studied at the Ruhr-University of Bochum, Germany & the University of Turku, Finland. He proceeded with his postgraduate studies at the Technical University of Helsinki (now Aalto University), Finland, in the field of Cartography & Geoinformatics, where he completed his doctoral dissertation and continued to work as a senior investigator. In 2008, he changed his position to the Technical University Munich (TUM) to work as the Head of Research at the Department of Cartography (LfK). In 2013, after completing his habilitation at the TUM, he was appointed Professor of Applied Geoinformatics at the University of Augsburg, Germany. His current research interests include, in particular, Geovisualization & Location Based Services (LBS).
Mobile Tartu 2022 – Prof. Mei-Po Kwan (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Keynote speech “Big data and geospatial technologies for smart cities research“
Professor Kwan Mei-Po is the Director of the Institute of Space and Earth Information Science, the Director of the Institute of Future Cities, Choh-Ming Li Professor of Geography and Resource Management, and an affiliated faculty member of the JC School of Public Health and Primary Care of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Prof. Kwan is a Fellow of the United Kingdom Academy of Social Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and American Association of Geographers and a Guggenheim Fellow. She was awarded many Outstanding Academic Achievement Awards by the American Association of Geographers, including the Distinguished Scholarship Honors, the Anderson Medal of Honors in Applied Geography, the Wilbanks Prize for Transformational Research in Geography, the Stanley Brunn Award for Creativity in Geography, the Edward L. Ullman Award for Outstanding Contributions to Transportation Geography, and the Melinda Meade Award for Outstanding Contributions to Health and Medical Research. Prof. Kwan has received research grants of more than USD 62.7 million, delivered about 380 keynote addresses, and given invited lectures and presentations in more than 20 countries. Her recent projects examine the health impacts of individual environmental exposure (e.g., noise, air pollution, green space), urban and mobility issues, the space-time dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic and the perception of data privacy; and the protection of geoprivacy via the development of a Geospatial Virtual Data Enclave (GVDE).
Mobile Tartu 2020 – Prof. Georg Gartner (Vienna University of Technology)
Keynote speech “Towards semantic location based services”
