Dirk Ahlers
Background and activities
Dr. Dirk Ahlers is a senior researcher and research manager with the NTNU Smart Sustainable Cities group of the Department of Architecture and Planning. He is the project manager of the +CityxChange European Lighthouse project and an individual contributor. There he helps to build Positive Energy Districts with 33 partners. These are a way for cities to jumpstart a hyperlocal European Energy Transition by integrating local renewables into the city, including energy, mobility, stakeholder and citizen engagement, organisational transitions, regulations, and ICT.
He is also the project manager and individual contributor for CrAFt and NEB-STAR.
He is working with cities and stakeholders towards urban digitalisation, urban transitions and climate action, the EU New European Bauhaus and the EU Cities Mission, the SCC1 Lighthouse Group, the EU Smart City Marketplace, as well as the NTNU NEB Forum.
He has a background and PhD in computer science and geospatial analysis and now applies it in the smart city context to bridge different disciplines and contributions towards climate action.
He has been an ERCIM Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the Data and Information Management group and a research scientist in the Information Systems group of the Department of Computer Science, working on Urban Intelligence, knowledge management, mobility and geospatial analysis, Smart Cities, and emission monitoring systems.
His research interests are Urban Intelligence, Smart Cities, Climate Mitigation, Sustainability, Climate Neutral Cities, Open Innovation, Urban Systems Modeling, Geospatial Retrieval, Information Retrieval, Web Mining, Search Engines, Information Access, Mobile, and Everything Geo.
You can find him at Geo: N 63.417002 E 10.404215
He is organizing the LocWeb - Location and the Web workshop series at the WWW conference series; he co-organised CS3CS — Workshop on City Strategies for Smart Sustainable Climate Solutions in Trondheim.
The latest is LocWeb2022 Workshop - Location and the Web @ WWW2022.
Some selected projects:
- +CityxChange – Positive City Exchange, developing Positive Energy Districts in Europe
- CrAFt — Creating Actionable Futures (Horizon Europe CSA for EU Cities Mission) New European Bauhaus transformations towards climate-neutral, beautiful and inclusive cities.
- NEB-STAR – New European Bauhaus STAvangeR. New European Bauhaus Lighthouse Project.
- DatSam — Datadrevet samskaping: metoder og verktøy for bærekraftig innovasjon og samfunnsutvikling [Data-driven co-creation: methods and tools for sustainable innovation and societal development] (Innovasjonsprosjekt i offentlig sektor, Norges Forskningsråd)
- ENHANCE – European Universities of Technology Alliance
- Contributor NEB NTNU Forum New European Bauhaus
- UBIMOB — Ubiquitous Data-Driven Urban Mobility
- SCIL — Smart City Infrastructure Lab
- c-valuate — Improving City-Scale Low-Carbon Investment Decision-Making
- FME-ZEN — Center of Zero Emission Neighbourhoods in Smart Cities
- NTNU Smart Sustainable Cities
- CTT — Carbon Track & Trace
- Campus Mobility Analysis
- OADE - Open Autonomous Digital Ecosystems
- LinkedDesign — Linked Knowledge in Manufacturing, Engineering and Design for Next-Generation Production
Course contributions:
- Climate-Neutral Cities – Student Think/Do Tank
- Data-Driven Co-Creation for Urban Innovation, Autumn 2021 (part of AAR5230)
- EiT project village: Climate-neutral, inclusive, beautiful & sustainable Nyhavna, Spring 2022 (part of AAR4912)
Scientific, academic and artistic work
A selection of recent journal publications, artistic productions, books, including book and report excerpts. See all publications in the database
2022
- (2022) Energy Citizenship in Positive Energy Districts – Towards a transdisciplinary approach to impact assessment. Buildings. vol. 12 (2).
- (2022) The Sense and Non-Sense of PEDs—Feeding Back Practical Experiences of Positive Energy District Demonstrators into the European PED Framework Definition Development Process. Energies. vol. 15 (12).
2021
- (2021) Searching in the Smart City? — An Information Access Challenge. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. vol. 2950.
- (2021) Approaches to Social Innovation in Positive Energy Districts (PEDs)—A Comparison of Norwegian Projects. Sustainability. vol. 13 (13).
- (2021) Modelling pervasive platforms and digital services for smart urban transformation using an enterprise architecture framework. Information Technology and People. vol. 34 (4).
- (2021) Energy Citizenship in New Energy Concepts. Environmental Sciences Proceedings. vol. 11 (1).
2020
- (2020) Making Sense of the Urban Future: Recommendation Systems in Smart Cities. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. vol. 2697.
- (2020) Report on the Tenth International Workshop on Location and the Web (LocWeb 2020) - Workshop held at The Web Conference, WWW2020. SIGIR Forum. vol. 54 (1).
- (2020) Big data driven multi-tier architecture for electric mobility as a service in smart cities: A design science approach. International Journal of Energy Sector Management. vol. 14 (5).
- (2020) The Governance Approach of Smart City Initiatives. Evidence from Trondheim, Bergen, and Bodø. Infrastructures. vol. 5 (4).
- (2020) Co-creation of smart sustainable cities : The 5G SOLUTIONS project. Eurescom Message.
2019
- (2019) Co-Creation of Positive Energy Blocks. IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science (EES). vol. 352 (1).
- (2019) API deployment for big data management towards sustainable energy prosumption in smart cities-a layered architecture perspective. International Journal of Sustainable Energy. vol. 39 (3).
- (2019) Big data-oriented energy prosumption service in smart community districts: a multi-case study perspective. Energy Informatics. vol. 2 (1).
- (2019) D2C-SM: Designing a Distributed-to-Centralized Software Management Architecture for Smart Cities. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). vol. 11701 LNCS.
2018
- (2018) Harnessing Mobility Data in Cities: A Case Study from the Bergen Region. NOKOBIT - Norsk konferanse for organisasjoners bruk av informasjonsteknologi. vol. 26 (1).
- (2018) Report on the Eighth International Workshop on Location and the Web (LocWeb 2018). SIGIR Forum. vol. 52 (2).
2017
- (2017) Supporting Municipal Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emission Inventories Using Business Process Modeling: A Case Study of Trondheim Municipality. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing. vol. 281.
- (2017) Report on the Seventh International Workshop on Location and the Web (LocWeb 2017). SIGIR Forum. vol. 51 (1).
- (2017) Investigating contextual ontologies and document corpus characteristics for information access in engineering settings. Journal of IT Cases and Applications. vol. 19 (1).
Competencies
- Databases and multimedia systems
- Geographic information systems
- Information and communication technology
- System development and design
- Sustainable urban development
- Mobile applications & services
- Datamining
- Information Systems
- Computer Science
- Information Storage and Retrieval
- Information retrieval
- Access to information
- Big Data
- Smart Cities
- Enterprise Architecture
- Internet of Things