Last mile logistics / cargo bikes

The potential of cargo bikes for large scale logistics is still mostly misunderstood. I review the logistical advantages of cargo bikes for last mile deliveries as well as the wider impact they can have on our cities. (article, twitter thread, podcast)

Electric cargo bikes deliver about 60% faster than vans in city centres. Benefitting from higher speeds and shorter parking times, simulations show cargo bikes can drop off 10 parcels an hour, compared with six for vans.
(report & media: the guardian, bloomberg, independent )

Computational cognitive science

People use a wide set of exploratory strategies when faced with new tasks. Their behaviour is best explained through a combination of 1) the ability to generalize from previous observations and 2) the use of heuristics. (RLDM'19)

The availability of information has an effect on people's epistemic drive, and can lead them to strongly favour new actions over rewarding ones. (cogsci'19)

Self-directed learning in new and changing environments: Understanding human algorithms for exploration (thesis)

Human-computer systems

People naturally annotate documents to engage with new information. We look at how search systems could use highlights to improve search results, and to drive exploration in complex knowledge domains. (CHI'19, CHIIR'19)

Language & cognition

Ideophones are a class of particularly expressive words. Articulatory gestures that imitate what they describe could explain how ideophones come to evoke such vivid sensory scenes. Patterns of gesture-to-meaning mappings can be found across many languages. (cogsci'19)

Music & representations

Musical genres are inherently ambiguous and difficult to define. Even more so is the task of establishing how genres relate to one another. We use hyperbolic embeddings to learn a general music genre taxonomy by inferring continuous hierarchies directly from a large dataset. (ISMIR'20)