Prof. Hannah Bast

We research new methods for the navigation in large transportation networks, typically road and transit networks. One focus of our work is dealing with shortest-paths problems in very large and complex networks. Another focus is the esthetic and functional visualization of such networks. Transit routing on Google Maps works with our algorithms. Another popular service from our group is Travic, a real-time visualization of all the public transit world-wide.

We research new methods for efficient and effective search on very large data, both unstructured and structured. We consider the whole spectrum from clever index data structures and query algorithms (we build all our systems from scratch) to convenient user interfaces (for experts as well as non-experts), and almost all of our work comes with functional software and a convincing demo. We explore and use both shallow and deep natural language processing techniques.