DiSC Blog
Rainy Sundays as Political Threat?
Can weather conditions influence voter turnout in Austrian elections? We examine the correlation between weather patterns and voter participation in the Austrian elections, employing a hybrid methodology that includes machine learning and traditional statistical analysis.
On the Stability of Soap Bubbles and Liquid Drops
How can we keep soap bubbles from bursting? This and other questions related to fluid surface tension raise curiosity and scientific challenges. New mathematical contributions pave the way towards comprehensive answers.
Tweaking Innsbruck's Bike Sharing Network
The transport company Innsbrucker Verkehrsbetriebe (IVB) operates a bike sharing system in Innsbruck. Bikes can be rented and returned at fixed locations throughout the city. We have developed a data-based approach that identifies areas where new bike stations would most benefit university students, a main user group of this service.
English Dialect Dictionary Online 4.0
EDD Online is a sophisticated interface to access the rich contents of the most comprehensive English dialect dictionary ever published, the English Dialect Dictionary by Joseph Wright (1898-1905). It covers the main English-speaking countries worldwide from 1700 to 1903. Owing to the implementation of diverse software, it allows for combined, nested, quantified and mappable query results on linguistic and cultural issues.
Assessing the Ventilation of Buildings
Austrian building regulations require sufficient ventilation to control indoor air quality and humidity levels, but fail to provide specific guidelines on how this should be accomplished. We have developed a Monte-Carlo-based calculation method that estimates the ventilation requirements to be implemented in an easy-to-use tool that requires as little input as possible.
Knowledge Graphs and Maps for Medieval Mining
We want to show how historic information can be represented and displayed in different formats to convey the information contained in archival resources. An online representation and transcription of two medieval documents containing mining awards are related to a knowledge graph and maps that permit the exploration of the relations between mining areas, mines and people.
White Christmas in Innsbruck?
Will we have a white Christmas in Innsbruck in 2022? As of nine days before Christmas, the answer has become quite clear. A machine-learning model that combines atmospheric science, meteorological observations and statistical expertise gave the answer how high (or low) the probability of waking up in a white landscape on December 24, 2022, is.
Tracking How Words Changed Meaning over Time
We designed and implemented an online service that allows investigating how the meaning of any word has developed historically. It uses Google Books n-gram data – a dataset of several terabytes of text data compiled from around 5% of all books ever published.
Designing the Monodomain Model with ANNs
We take a fresh look at approximation paradigms for dynamical systems, by fitting differential equations to cardiac data using artificial neural networks (ANNs). As an example, the equations of the monodomain system model the electric activity inside cardiac tissues, and we trained a neural network approximating the expressions of their nonlinear terms.
Clustering Brain Activation to Study Social Cognition
We performed a meta-analysis and clustered neuroimaging data from 4207 participants. Results provide a roadmap for dissecting human social cognition into more elementary and neurobiologically grounded processes.