People
Working for a better world
The novel coronavirus is constantly dominating the news. But the world is also facing up to the Black Live Matters debate. Here we also present four students who are making their data available to everyone. All of them are researchers who are on their own special missions.
Image: Simon Tanner
Gesine Krüger is a historian at the University of Zurich who specialises in the politics of remembrance. She is engaging with the ‘Black lives matter’ debate and the destruction of monuments of men who profited from the slave trade in the USA, England and Belgium. She sees the positive side to these symbolic acts, even if they do not tackle the problem of racism directly. “They make the problem visible. This is why such acts are so powerful. The statues are never just about a single story – they unite many different layers of history, even though it’s racism that is currently in the foreground”. She also believes “that removing the statues is just one of many possible solutions”. What really matters is that we all begin the conversation about these things, she says. jho
Image: NZZ
Didier Pittet is an infectious diseases researcher at the Geneva University Hospitals (HUG). He lent his face to the Swiss Railways campaign ‘Back on the road together’ that was launched when the normal rail timetable was re-started. As one might expect from an expert in infection control, he wore a face mask for the photo. This is despite his insistence that other protective measures are actually more significant: “Wearing masks makes us forget certain protective measures that are even more important – such as social distancing and hand hygiene”. Pittet’s team was responsible for the ‘Geneva hand hygiene model’ that is well-known all over the world and is responsible for a massive drop in the infection rate at hospitals. ff
Image: zVg
Ueli Isenschmid, Anian Pleisch, Janik Sievert and Severin Spörri have won the ‘Open Data Student Award 2020’. This prize is given to students who engage in exemplary work with open data, and has now been awarded for the third time. The work in question has to be reproducible and must have practical relevance. These four students of geoinformatics at ETH Zurich created a visualisation of public transport capacity in Zurich. The local transport authority, the Verkehrsbetriebe Zürich (VBZ), collects data about the use of their vehicles and publishes it online where it is freely accessible to everyone. The students also used an open-source library to help create their interactive web map. jho
