Dietmar Offenhuber is a research fellow in the Senseable City Lab at the Department for Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, USA). In his research, he focuses on the methods of urban planning and civil discourse, paying special attention to the role of visualization and presentation, which he has devoted his three books to. Along with that, his professional interests embrace the strictly urban problems of a coherent urban environment and garbage utilization. Offenhuber holds a Diploma Engineer Degree in Architecture from Technical University Vienna and a Master in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Lab, where he is also a doctoral candidate. He was professor at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Media Art Research, a researcher at the Ars Electronica Future Lab (Linz, Austria), and taught Interface Culture at the Art University Linz. Offenhuber exhibited his artworks at the Sundance Film Festival, the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Centre Georges Pompidou, and other venues. He has received a number of prestigious professional awards.
Katja Schechtner is a research affiliate at the MIT Media Lab. Within MIT’s collaboration program with the Asian Development Bank, she is engaged in the development and implementation of major investment projects in the field of public transport systems, and is also head of development team working on creating new tools for analyzing urban processes. In 2004–2012, she was head of research team who explored passenger flows and transportation modeling at the Austrian Institute of Technology. Schechtner works as a consultant for the European Commission, as well as a number of European research institutes. She reads lecture courses at educational institutions in the U.S., Austria and China, and is a regular contributor to publications dedicated to the research of urban statistics and data collection technologies.
