Florian Lautenschlager, M.Sc.

Chair of Data Science (Informatik X)
University of Würzburg
Am Hubland
97074 Würzburg
Germany

Email: Lautenschlager@informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de

Phone: (+49 931) 31 - 86489

Office: Room B103 (Computer Science Building M2)

Projects and Interests

In the project P2Map I am trying to combine objective sensor data with subjective context information and to use this combined information in machine learning methods to predict a geospatial and temporal distribution of air quality.

Therefore my interests spread across data mining and machine learning methods in general and more specificly methods for spatiotemporal data, for example land use regression. I am trying to develop a more general approach, because most land use regression models are designed for certain regions and rely on land usage data that may be only available in this region. For this task, neural networks, especially convolutional neural networks, are tested at the moment.

In another facet of the P2Map-project, an array of low cost sensors has to be calibrated in order to reliably measure the surrounding air quality. Finally for the incorporation of the subjective data, like context information or perceptions, I will be working with techniques from the field of natural language processing.

Teaching

Introductions to algorithms and data structures:

Seminar "Web 2.0":

SS 2017

Seminar "Machine Learning":

SS 2019

Publications

OpenLUR: Off-the-shelf air pollution modeling with open features and machine learning. Lautenschlager, Florian; Becker, Martin; Kobs, Konstantin; Steininger, Michael; Davidson, Padraig; Krause, Anna; Hotho, Andreas. In Atmospheric Environment, 233, bl 117535. 2020.
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To assess the exposure of citizens to pollutants like NOx or particulate matter in urban areas, land use regression (LUR) models are a well established method. LUR models leverage information about environmental and anthropogenic factors such as cars, heating, or industry to predict air pollution in areas where no measurements have been made. However, existing approaches are often not globally applicable and require tedious hyper-parameter tuning to enable high quality predictions. In this work, we tackle these issues by introducing OpenLUR, an off-the-shelf approach for modeling air pollution that (i) works on a set of novel features solely extracted from the globally and openly available data source OpenStreetMap and (ii) is based on state-of-the-art machine learning featuring automated hyper-parameter tuning in order to minimize manual effort. We show that our proposed features are able to outperform their counterparts from local and closed sources, and illustrate how automated hyper parameter tuning can yield competitve results while alleviating the need for expert knowledge in machine learning and manual effort. Importantly, we further demonstrate the potential of the global availability of our features by applying cross-learning across different cities in order to reduce the need for a large amount of training samples. Overall, OpenLUR represents an off-the-shelf approach that facilitates easily reproducible experiments and the development of globally applicable models.

@article{lautenschlager2020openlur, abstract = {To assess the exposure of citizens to pollutants like NOx or particulate matter in urban areas, land use regression (LUR) models are a well established method. LUR models leverage information about environmental and anthropogenic factors such as cars, heating, or industry to predict air pollution in areas where no measurements have been made. However, existing approaches are often not globally applicable and require tedious hyper-parameter tuning to enable high quality predictions. In this work, we tackle these issues by introducing OpenLUR, an off-the-shelf approach for modeling air pollution that (i) works on a set of novel features solely extracted from the globally and openly available data source OpenStreetMap and (ii) is based on state-of-the-art machine learning featuring automated hyper-parameter tuning in order to minimize manual effort. We show that our proposed features are able to outperform their counterparts from local and closed sources, and illustrate how automated hyper parameter tuning can yield competitve results while alleviating the need for expert knowledge in machine learning and manual effort. Importantly, we further demonstrate the potential of the global availability of our features by applying cross-learning across different cities in order to reduce the need for a large amount of training samples. Overall, OpenLUR represents an off-the-shelf approach that facilitates easily reproducible experiments and the development of globally applicable models.}, author = {Lautenschlager, Florian and Becker, Martin and Kobs, Konstantin and Steininger, Michael and Davidson, Padraig and Krause, Anna and Hotho, Andreas}, journal = {Atmospheric Environment}, keywords = {pollution}, month = {07}, pages = 117535, title = {OpenLUR: Off-the-shelf air pollution modeling with open features and machine learning}, volume = 233, year = 2020 }
MapLUR: Exploring a New Paradigm for Estimating Air Pollution Using Deep Learning on Map Images. Steininger, Michael; Kobs, Konstantin; Zehe, Albin; Lautenschlager, Florian; Becker, Martin; Hotho, Andreas. In ACM Trans. Spatial Algorithms Syst., 6(3). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2020.
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Land-use regression (LUR) models are important for the assessment of air pollution concentrations in areas without measurement stations. While many such models exist, they often use manually constructed features based on restricted, locally available data. Thus, they are typically hard to reproduce and challenging to adapt to areas beyond those they have been developed for. In this paper, we advocate a paradigm shift for LUR models: We propose the Data-driven, Open, Global (DOG) paradigm that entails models based on purely data-driven approaches using only openly and globally available data. Progress within this paradigm will alleviate the need for experts to adapt models to the local characteristics of the available data sources and thus facilitate the generalizability of air pollution models to new areas on a global scale. In order to illustrate the feasibility of the DOG paradigm for LUR, we introduce a deep learning model called MapLUR. It is based on a convolutional neural network architecture and is trained exclusively on globally and openly available map data without requiring manual feature engineering. We compare our model to state-of-the-art baselines like linear regression, random forests and multi-layer perceptrons using a large data set of modeled NO2 concentrations in Central London. Our results show that MapLUR significantly outperforms these approaches even though they are provided with manually tailored features. Furthermore, we illustrate that the automatic feature extraction inherent to models based on the DOG paradigm can learn features that are readily interpretable and closely resemble those commonly used in traditional LUR approaches.

@article{steininger2020maplur, abstract = {Land-use regression (LUR) models are important for the assessment of air pollution concentrations in areas without measurement stations. While many such models exist, they often use manually constructed features based on restricted, locally available data. Thus, they are typically hard to reproduce and challenging to adapt to areas beyond those they have been developed for. In this paper, we advocate a paradigm shift for LUR models: We propose the Data-driven, Open, Global (DOG) paradigm that entails models based on purely data-driven approaches using only openly and globally available data. Progress within this paradigm will alleviate the need for experts to adapt models to the local characteristics of the available data sources and thus facilitate the generalizability of air pollution models to new areas on a global scale. In order to illustrate the feasibility of the DOG paradigm for LUR, we introduce a deep learning model called MapLUR. It is based on a convolutional neural network architecture and is trained exclusively on globally and openly available map data without requiring manual feature engineering. We compare our model to state-of-the-art baselines like linear regression, random forests and multi-layer perceptrons using a large data set of modeled NO2 concentrations in Central London. Our results show that MapLUR significantly outperforms these approaches even though they are provided with manually tailored features. Furthermore, we illustrate that the automatic feature extraction inherent to models based on the DOG paradigm can learn features that are readily interpretable and closely resemble those commonly used in traditional LUR approaches.}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, author = {Steininger, Michael and Kobs, Konstantin and Zehe, Albin and Lautenschlager, Florian and Becker, Martin and Hotho, Andreas}, journal = {ACM Trans. Spatial Algorithms Syst.}, keywords = {sys:relevantfor:vgiscience}, month = {04}, number = 3, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, title = {MapLUR: Exploring a New Paradigm for Estimating Air Pollution Using Deep Learning on Map Images}, volume = 6, year = 2020 }
Anomaly Detection in Beehives using Deep Recurrent Autoencoders. Davidson, Padraig; Steininger, Michael; Lautenschlager, Florian; Kobs, Konstantin; Krause, Anna; Hotho, Andreas. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Sensor Networks (SENSORNETS 2020), bll 142–149. SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda., 2020.
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@inproceedings{davidson2020anomaly, author = {Davidson, Padraig and Steininger, Michael and Lautenschlager, Florian and Kobs, Konstantin and Krause, Anna and Hotho, Andreas}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Sensor Networks (SENSORNETS 2020)}, keywords = {beehive}, number = 9, pages = {142-149}, publisher = {SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda.}, title = {Anomaly Detection in Beehives using Deep Recurrent Autoencoders}, year = 2020 }
SimLoss: Class Similarities in Cross Entropy. Kobs, Konstantin; Steininger, Michael; Zehe, Albin; Lautenschlager, Florian; Hotho, Andreas. 2020.
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One common loss function in neural network classification tasks is Categorical Cross Entropy (CCE), which punishes all misclassifications equally. However, classes often have an inherent structure. For instance, classifying an image of a rose as "violet" is better than as "truck". We introduce SimLoss, a drop-in replacement for CCE that incorporates class similarities along with two techniques to construct such matrices from task-specific knowledge. We test SimLoss on Age Estimation and Image Classification and find that it brings significant improvements over CCE on several metrics. SimLoss therefore allows for explicit modeling of background knowledge by simply exchanging the loss function, while keeping the neural network architecture the same. Code and additional resources can be found at https://github.com/konstantinkobs/SimLoss.

@misc{kobs2020simloss, abstract = {One common loss function in neural network classification tasks is Categorical Cross Entropy (CCE), which punishes all misclassifications equally. However, classes often have an inherent structure. For instance, classifying an image of a rose as "violet" is better than as "truck". We introduce SimLoss, a drop-in replacement for CCE that incorporates class similarities along with two techniques to construct such matrices from task-specific knowledge. We test SimLoss on Age Estimation and Image Classification and find that it brings significant improvements over CCE on several metrics. SimLoss therefore allows for explicit modeling of background knowledge by simply exchanging the loss function, while keeping the neural network architecture the same. Code and additional resources can be found at https://github.com/konstantinkobs/SimLoss.}, author = {Kobs, Konstantin and Steininger, Michael and Zehe, Albin and Lautenschlager, Florian and Hotho, Andreas}, keywords = {lossfunction}, note = {cite arxiv:2003.03182Comment: This paper is going to be published in the proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems (ISMIS)}, title = {SimLoss: Class Similarities in Cross Entropy}, year = 2020 }
EveryAware Gears: A Tool to visualize and analyze all types of Citizen Science Data. Lautenschlager, Florian; Becker, Martin; Steininger, Michael; Hotho, Andreas. In Proceedings of VGI Geovisual Analytics Workshop, colocated with BDVA 2018, D. Burghardt, S. Chen, G. Andrienko, N. Andrienko, R. Purves, A. Diehl (reds.). KOPS, 2018.
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@inproceedings{lautenschlager2018everyaware, author = {Lautenschlager, Florian and Becker, Martin and Steininger, Michael and Hotho, Andreas}, booktitle = {Proceedings of VGI Geovisual Analytics Workshop, colocated with BDVA 2018}, editor = {Burghardt, Dirk and Chen, Siming and Andrienko, Gennady and Andrienko, Nathalia and Purves, Ross and Diehl, Alexandra}, keywords = {p2map2:antrag:own}, month = 10, publisher = {KOPS}, title = {EveryAware Gears: A Tool to visualize and analyze all types of Citizen Science Data}, year = 2018 }
Air Trails--Urban Air Quality Campaign Exploration Patterns. Becker, Martin; Lautenschlager, Florian; Hotho, Andreas. In AGILE Workshop. 2018.
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@article{becker2018air, author = {Becker, Martin and Lautenschlager, Florian and Hotho, Andreas}, journal = {AGILE Workshop}, keywords = {p2map2:antrag:own}, title = {Air Trails–Urban Air Quality Campaign Exploration Patterns}, year = 2018 }

Florian Lautenschlager, M.Sc.

Projects and Interests

Teaching

Publications

Data privacy protection

Data privacy protection

Picture credits