Martin Dittus

Martin Dittus Photo

AWARDED VEIV ENGD

Martin Dittus studied computing in Berlin, worked as a software developer and project manager at the Internet startup Last.fm, and was awarded a master's degree at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at UCL. He is currently completing his doctorate at the ICRI Cities at UCL.

Martin is particularly interested in informal means of data-driven knowledge production that don't have to rely on well-funded specialists, and in the challenges of coordinating large numbers of self-motivated contributors. His research contributes to a better understanding of community engagement factors for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), a volunteer initiative with tens of thousands of participants. At core this is quantitative work, and the main outputs are quantitative observational studies, data analyses, and data visualisations. Martin makes use of the "hard" evidence of contributor data traces, but also the "soft" evidence of knowing the practices and motivations of the community.

He is maintaining a public research diary at: https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/dekstop/diary 

Key presentations and project outputs are also featured at: http://martindittus.info

Publications and Presentations

Dittus M, Quattrone G, Capra L. Mass Participation During Emergency Response: Event-centric Crowdsourcing in Humanitarian Mapping. 20th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, Portland, OR. 28 Feb 2017.

Quattrone G, Dittus M, Capra L. Work Always in Progress: Analysing Maintenance Practices in Spatial Crowd-sourced Datasets. 20th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, Portland, OR. 28 Feb 2017.

Dittus M, Quattrone G, Capra L. Social Contribution Settings and Newcomer Retention in Humanitarian Crowd Mapping. 8th International Conference on Social Informatics, Bellevue, WA. 30 Nov 2016.

Quattrone G, Dittus M, Capra L. Exploring Maintenance Practices in Crowd-Mapping. 27th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media. 01 Jun 2016.

Dittus MS. Large-scale Volunteer Engagement in Humanitarian Mapping US. Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing Companion. ACM. 139-142. 27 Feb 2016.

Dittus MS, Capra L, Quattrone G. Analysing Volunteer Engagement in Humanitarian Mapping: Building Contributor Communities at Large Scale US. Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. ACM. 108-118. 22 Feb 2016.

Martin Dittus, 2016, Building large-scale crowdsourcing communities with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, Data Natives 2016 and Connected Life 2016 and State of the Map 2016, Brussels

Part of their ICT4D seminar series at the Oxford Internet Institute in February 2016: OII Talk: Big Data and Putting the World's Vulnerable People on the Maphttps://www.openstreetmap.org/user/dekstop/diary/38007

Primary Supervisor: Licia Capra

Industry Sponsor: Intel

Crowdsourcing | Crowd Mapping | Community Engagement | Computational Social Science | Data Science