The AGIT 2026 International Conference on Geoinformatics took place in Salzburg, Austria, from July 8 to 9, 2026. The conference focused on current developments, innovative applications, and forward-looking ideas in geoinformatics and Earth observation. The conference was aimed at researchers, students, representatives of public administration, and industry stakeholders.
As part of the conference, Severin Brochhagen gave a presentation on “Urban Comfort” during the “Climate Change & Urban Heat” session on the first day of the conference. He presented the paper “Towards Real Urban Comfort: Bridging the Gap Between Subjectively Perceived and Objectively Measured Comfort Parameters Using Low-Cost Sensors,” which he co-authored with Hossein Arefi.
The research was conducted as part of the PACE ( Personalized Assessment of Urban Comfort for Explainable Routing) project . At the heart of the research is a mobile, backpack-mounted, low-cost multi-sensor prototype. It is specifically designed for so-called “Urban Comfort Walks” and synchronously records 18 objective environmental parameters related to the atmosphere, air quality, visual environment, and space.
At the same time, the system enables the real-time collection of participants’ subjective feedback via a local web application. To subsequently translate the heterogeneous data streams into a unified comfort model, the paper presents a novel three-stage methodological framework that integrates, among other things, artificial neural networks and Explainable AI. The scientific paper was published in Volume 2 (2026) of the University of Salzburg’s conference series.
The conference program included scientific presentations, a poster exhibition, practice-oriented workshops, and the so-called “Marketplace” as an accompanying trade show. Thematically, AGIT covered a broad spectrum: from climate change and urban heat islands to geodata analysis and digital city twins.
