Steffen Fritz
Program Director and Principal Research Scholar
Strategic Initiatives Program
Principal Research Scholar
Novel Data Ecosystems for Sustainability Research Group
Advancing Systems Analysis Program
Contact
Biography
Steffen Fritz is the IIASA Strategic Initiatives Program Director and a researcher in the Novel Data Ecosystems Research Group of the Advancing Systems Analysis Program.He holds a Master of Science degree in Geographical Information for Development from the University of Durham, UK, and a PhD from the University of Leeds, UK. After spending time as a researcher at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Ispra, Italy, Fritz joined IIASA as a research scholar, where he has since become the initiator and driving force behind Geo-Wiki.org and several other projects.
He was the principal investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) funded CrowdLand Consolidator Grant and the European Union's Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation funded LandSense and WeObserve projects. He is currently leading the development of the new Picture Pile Platform, which is funded by an ERC Proof of Concept Grant. In the various capacities he acted in since 2009, including coordinator, principal investigator, work package, or task leader, Fritz has been responsible for a diverse range of tasks and an overall budget of approximately EUR 4.2 million. He has more than 160 peer-reviewed publications and has widely published in high-level journals.
Fritz’s research interests include transformative societal and policy solutions, machine learning and artificial intelligence, earth observation, citizen science, crowdsourcing, volunteered geographical information, and citizen generated data. He also has a keen interest in applications of Earth Observation to food security, land-use science, global and regional vegetation monitoring, crop yield and crop acreage estimations of agricultural crops, serious gaming, gamification, in-situ data collection of land use and land cover data via mobile technologies, and the role of citizen science for the monitoring and implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Last update: 09 DEC 2021
Publications
Fritz, S. , See, L. , Rembold, F., Massart, M., Negre, T., & Hagen, C. von (2008). Comparing different land cover data sets for agricultural monitoring in Africa. In: Representing, Modeling and Visualizing the Natural Environment. Eds. Mount, N., Aplin, P., Priestnall, G., & Harvey, G., London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-4200-5549-8
Liu, J., Fritz, S. , Wesenbeeck, C.F.A. van, Fuchs, M., You, L., Obersteiner, M. , & Yang, H. (2008). A spatially explicit assessment of current and future hotspots of hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa in the context of global change. Global and Planetary Change 64 (3) 222-235. 10.1016/j.gloplacha.2008.09.007.
Fritz, S. , Massart, M., Savin, I., Gallego, J., & Rembold, F. (2008). The use of MODIS data to derive acreage estimations for larger fields: A case study in the south-western Rostov region of Russia. International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation 10 (4) 453-466. 10.1016/j.jag.2007.12.004.
McCallum, I. , Kidd, R., Fritz, S. , Kraxner, F., & Obersteiner, M. (2008). Banda Aceh-The Value of Earth Observation Data in Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction: A Case Study. IIASA Interim Report. IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria: IR-08-048
Fritz, S. , Scholes, R.J., Obersteiner, M. , Bouma, J., & Reyers, B. (2008). A conceptual framework for assessing the benefits of a Global Earth Observation System of Systems. IEEE Systems Journal (J-SYS) 2 (3) 338-348. 10.1109/JSYST.2008.926688.