Curdin Derungs

Curdin Derungs, Dr.

Former Head of the GIS (now SDS) Group (until 6/2018)

Academic Background

I studied Geography from autumn 2002 until winter 2008 and finished my studies with a master degree. The foci of my studies were Geographic Information Systems and Science (GIS) and Atmospheric Sciences. I did my master thesis in GIS on the topic “What is a mountain? Where is a mountain?”. In 2010, after working for two years in the public and private sector, I decided to conduct a PhD at the University of Zurich. My thesis was associated with the domains of spatial data mining and geographic information retrieval. In particular I investigated how places are described in (historic) text documents and how such descriptions can then be retrieved and analyse automatically. I thus worked with large compilations text, in the form of digitized books, social media contents, blogs or homepages. My thesis is therefore a combination of theories and techniques from ethnographic research, (computational) linguistics, data science and GIScience.

PhD Thesis

I conducted my PhD thesis in GIS at the University of Zurich. The thesis was supervised by Prof. Ross Purves and co-supervized by Dr. Bettina Waldvogel and Martin Hägeli.

Derungs, C. From Text to Landscape: Extraction of Landscape Concepts through the Resolution of Ambiguity and Vagueness present in Descriptions of Natural Landscapes. PhD Thesis, Department of Geography, University of Zurich, 2013. PDF (a summary of the thesis can be found here)

Publications (ZORA Query)

ZORA Publication List

Publications

Schweinsberg, Martin; Feldman, Michael; Staub, Nicola; van den Akker, Olmo R; van Aert, Robbie C M; van Assen, Marcel A L M; Liu, Yang; Althoff, Tim; Heer, Jeffrey; Kale, Alex; Mohamed, Zainab; Amireh, Hashem; Venkatesh Prasad, Vaishali; Bernstein, Abraham; Robinson, Emily; Snellman, Kaisa; Amy Sommer, S; Otner, Sarah M G; Robinson, David; Madan, Nikhil; Silberzahn, Raphael; Goldstein, Pavel; Tierney, Warren; Murase, Toshio; Mandl, Benjamin; Viganola, Domenico; Strobl, Carolin; Schaumans, Catherine B C; Kelchtermans, Stijn; Naseeb, Chan; Mason Garrison, S; Yarkoni, Tal; Richard Chan, C S; Adie, Prestone; Alaburda, Paulius; Albers, Casper; Alspaugh, Sara; Alstott, Jeff; Nelson, Andrew A; Ariño de la Rubia, Eduardo; Arzi, Adbi; Bahník, Štěpán; Baik, Jason; Winther Balling, Laura; Banker, Sachin; AA Baranger, David; Barr, Dale J; Barros-Rivera, Brenda; Bauer, Matt; Blaise, Enuh; Boelen, Lisa; Bohle Carbonell, Katerina; Briers, Robert A; Burkhard, Oliver; Canela, Miguel-Angel; Castrillo, Laura; Catlett, Timothy; Chen, Olivia; Clark, Michael; Cohn, Brent; Coppock, Alex; Cugueró-Escofet, Natàlia; Curran, Paul G; Cyrus-Lai, Wilson; Dai, David; Valentino Dalla Riva, Giulio; Danielsson, Henrik; Russo, Rosaria de F S M; de Silva, Niko; Derungs, Curdin; Dondelinger, Frank; Duarte de Souza, Carolina; Tyson Dube, B; Dubova, Marina; Mark Dunn, Ben; Adriaan Edelsbrunner, Peter; Finley, Sara; Fox, Nick; Gnambs, Timo; Gong, Yuanyuan; Grand, Erin; Greenawalt, Brandon; Han, Dan; Hanel, Paul H P; Hong, Antony B; Hood, David; Hsueh, Justin; Huang, Lilian; Hui, Kent N; Hultman, Keith A; Javaid, Azka; Ji Jiang, Lily; Jong, Jonathan; Kamdar, Jash; Kane, David; Kappler, Gregor; Kaszubowski, Erikson; Kavanagh, Christopher M; Khabsa, Madian; Kleinberg, Bennett; Kouros, Jens; Krause, Heather; Krypotos, Angelos-Miltiadis; Lavbič, Dejan; Ling Lee, Rui; Leffel, Timothy; Yang Lim, Wei; Liverani, Silvia; Loh, Bianca; Lønsmann, Dorte; Wei Low, Jia; Lu, Alton; MacDonald, Kyle; Madan, Christopher R; Hjorth Madsen, Lasse; Maimone, Christina; Mangold, Alexandra; Marshall, Adrienne; Ester Matskewich, Helena; Mavon, Kimia; McLain, Katherine L; McNamara, Amelia A; McNeill, Mhairi; Mertens, Ulf; Miller, David; Moore, Ben; Moore, Andrew; Nantz, Eric; Nasrullah, Ziauddin; Nejkovic, Valentina; Nell, Colleen S; Arthur Nelson, Andrew; Nilsonne, Gustav; Nolan, Rory; O'Brien, Christopher E; O'Neill, Patrick; O'Shea, Kieran; Olita, Toto; Otterbacher, Jahna; Palsetia, Diana; Pereira, Bianca; Pozdniakov, Ivan; Protzko, John; Reyt, Jean-Nicolas; Riddle, Travis; (Akmal) Ridhwan Omar Ali, Amal; Ropovik, Ivan; Rosenberg, Joshua M; Rothen, Stephane; Schulte-Mecklenbeck, Michael; Sharma, Nirek; Shotwell, Gordon; Skarzynski, Martin; Stedden, William; Stodden, Victoria; Stoffel, Martin A; Stoltzman, Scott; Subbaiah, Subashini; Tatman, Rachael; Thibodeau, Paul H; Tomkins, Sabina; Valdivia, Ana; Druijff-van de Woestijne, Gerrieke B; Viana, Laura; Villesèche, Florence; Duncan Wadsworth, W; Wanders, Florian; Watts, Krista; Wells, Jason D; Whelpley, Christopher E; Won, Andy; Wu, Lawrence; Yip, Arthur; Youngflesh, Casey; Yu, Ju-Chi; Zandian, Arash; Zhang, Leilei; Zibman, Chava; Luis Uhlmann, Eric (2021). Same data, different conclusions: Radical dispersion in empirical results when independent analysts operationalize and test the same hypothesis. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 165:228-249.
Derungs, Curdin; Sieber, Christian; Glaser, Elvira; Weibel, Robert (2020). Dialect borders - political regions are better predictors than economy or religion. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 35(2):276-295.
Leemann, Adrian; Derungs, Curdin; Elspaß, Stephan (2019). Analyzing linguistic variation and change using gamification web apps: the case of German-speaking Europe. PLoS ONE, 14:online.
Egli, Markus; Hunt, Allen G; Dahms, Dennis; Raab, Gerald; Derungs, Curdin; Raimondi, Salvatore; Yu, Fang (2018). Prediction of soil formation as a function of age using the percolation theory approach. Frontiers in Environmental Science:6:108.
McNew, Garland; Derungs, Curdin; Moran, Steven (2018). Towards faithfully visualizing global linguistic diversity. In: Calzolari, Nicoletta. Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018). Paris, France: European Language Resources Association (ELRA), 805-809.
Derungs, Curdin; Köhl, Martina; Weibel, Robert; Bickel, Balthasar (2018). Environmental factors drive language density more in food-producing than in hunter–gatherer populations. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences, 285(1885):20172851.
Ranacher, Peter; Van Gijn, Rik; Derungs, Curdin (2017). Identifying probable pathways of language diffusion in South America. In: AGILE conference 2017, Wageningen, 9 May 2017 - 12 May 2017.
Wartmann, Flurina M; Derungs, Curdin; Purves, Ross S (2016). Characterizing place: an empirical comparison between user-generated content and freelisting data. International Conference on GIScience Short Paper Proceedings, 1(1):336-339.
Fravolini, Giulia; Egli, Markus; Derungs, Curdin; Cherubini, Paolo; Ascher-Jenull, Judith; Gómez-Brandón, María; Bardelli, Tommaso; Tognetti, Roberto; Lombardi, Fabio; Marchetti, Marco (2016). Soil attributes and microclimate are important drivers of initial deadwood decay in sub-alpine Norway spruce forests. Science of the Total Environment, 569-570:1064-1076.
Derungs, Curdin; Purves, Ross S (2016). Mining nearness relations from an n-grams Web corpus in geographical space. Spatial Cognition & Computation, 16(4):301-322.
Egli, Markus; Hafner, Simon; Derungs, Curdin; Ascher-Jenull, Judith; Camin, Federica; Sartori, Giacomo; Raab, Gerald; Bontempo, Luana; Paolini, Mauro; Ziller, Luca; Bardelli, Tommaso; Petrillo, Marta; Abiven, Samuel (2016). Decomposition and stabilisation of Norway spruce needle-derived material in Alpine soils using a 13C-labelling approach in the field. Biogeochemistry, 131(3):321-338.
Derungs, Curdin; Purves, Ross S (2016). Characterising landscape variation through spatial folksonomies. Applied Geography, 75:60-70.
Sautier, Jerome; Derungs, Curdin (2015). Spatial characteristics of a large web n-gram corpus. In: GIR '15 9th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval, Paris, 26 November 2015 - 27 November 2015. ACM Digital Library, online.
Purves, Ross S; Palacio, Damien; Derungs, Curdin (2015). Development and evaluation of a geographic information retrieval system using fine grained toponyms. Journal of Spatial Information Science, (11):1-29.
Wartmann, Flurina M; Egorova, Ekaterina; Derungs, Curdin; Mark, David M; Purves, Ross S (2015). More than a list: what outdoor free listings of landscape categories reveal about commonsense geographic concepts and memory search strategies. In: Fabrikant, Sara I; Raubal, Martin; Bertolotto, Michela; Davies, Clare; Freundschuh, Scott; Bell, Scott. Spatial Information Theory. 12th International Conference, COSIT 2015, Santa Fe, NM, USA, October 12-16, 2015, Proceedings. Cham: Springer, 224-243.
Purves, Ross S; Derungs, Curdin (2015). From space to place: place-based explorations of text. International Journal of Humanities and Arts Comouting, 9(1):74-94.
Addor, Nans; Ewen, Tracy; Johnson, Leigh; Cöltekin, Arzu; Derungs, Curdin; Muccione, Veruska (2015). From products to processes: Academic events to foster interdisciplinary and iterative dialogue in a changing climate. Earth's Future, 3(8):289-297.
Derungs, Curdin; Purves, Ross S (2014). Where’s near? Using web tri-grams to explore spatial relations. In: GIScience 2014: Eighth International Conference on Geographic Information Science, Vienna (A), 23 September 2014 - 26 September 2014, 158-162.
Derungs, Curdin. From text to landscape: extraction of landscape concepts through the resolution of ambiguity and vagueness present in descriptions of natural landscapes. 2014, University of Zurich, Faculty of Science.
Palacio, Damien; Derungs, Curdin; Purves, Ross (2013). Creating test collections from user generated content for GIR evaluation. In: GIR'13: 7th ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval, Orlando, FL, USA, 5 November 2013. Association for Computing Machinery, 82-83.
Derungs, Curdin; Purves, Ross S (2013). From text to landscape: locating, identifying and mapping the use of landscape features in a Swiss Alpine corpus. International Journal of Geographical Information Science:online.
Derungs, Curdin; Wartmann, Flurina M; Purves, Ross S; Mark, David M (2013). The meanings of the generic parts of toponyms: use and limitations of gazetteers in studies of landscape terms. In: Tenbrink, Thora; Stell, John; Galton, Antony; Wood, Zena. Spatial Information Theory. Cham: Springer, 261-278.
Derungs, Curdin; Palacio, Damien; Purves, Ross S (2012). Resolving fine granularity toponyms: Evaluation of a disambiguation approach. In: GIScience 2012: Seventh International Conference on Geographic Information Science, Columbus, Ohio, 18 September 2012 - 21 September 2012, online.
Derungs, Curdin; Purves, Ross S (2012). Measuring topographic similarity of toponyms. In: AGILE 2012, 15th AGILE International Conference on Geographic Information Science, Avignon, FR, 24 April 2012 - 27 April 2012, 30-34.
Derungs, Curdin; Purves, Ross S; Waldvogel, Bettina (2011). Toponym disambiguation of landscape features using geomorphometric characteristics. In: 11th International Conference of GeoComputation, London, 20 July 2011 - 22 July 2011, 106-110.
Derungs, Curdin; Purves, Ross S (2007). Empirical experiments on the nature of Swiss mountains. In: GISRUK 2007 Geographical Information Science Research Conference, Maynooth (Ireland), 11 April 2007 - 13 April 2007, online.

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