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 also the project manager of the +CityxChange European Lighthouse project. There he helps to build Positive Energy Districts with 32 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 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
• 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

See the full list of publications here or here.

Course contributions:

• 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)