ETH Zurich is one of the leading international universities for technology and the natural sciences. It is well-known for its excellent education, ground-breaking fundamental research and for putting its new findings directly into practice. It offers rese
“Future Cities” is a series of urban MOOCs bringing the latest research results on planning, managing and transforming cities to those places in the world where they are needed most.“Future Cities” provides an overview.“Quality of Life: Livability in Future Cities” describes factors of livability in cities.“Smart Cities” presents realistic approaches, methods and techniques to increase the sustainability and resilience of cities."Reponsive Cities" explore the future of urbanization as you learn about responsive Cities, ones that bring the city back to their citizens.Our long-term goal is to make the “Future Cities” series on urban MOOCs the worldwide first and complete series of urban courses dealing with the design, management and transformation of cities for their sustainable and resilient future. This leads to a modular collection of urban MOOCs for each part of the urban system. The first overview course “Future Cities” opens a holistic view on existing and future cities. Each following urban MOOC increases in depth and in specialization.
Cities are becoming the predominant living and working environment of humanity, and for this reason, livability or quality of life in the city has become crucial.This urban planning course will focus on four areas that directly affect livability in a city: Urban energy, urban climate, urban ecology and urban mobility. The course begins by presenting measurable criteria for the assessment of livability, and how to positively influence the design of cities towards greater livability. We will focus on this basic topic of the human habitat in a holistic way, and introduce possibilities of participatory urban design by citizens, leading towards the development of a citizen design science.You will be able to share your experiences with the other participants in the course and also with the experts from the teaching team. In completing this course, you will better understand how to make a city more livable by going beyond the physical appearance and by focusing on different properties and impact factors of the urban system.Livability in Future Cities is the second course in a series of MOOCs under the title “Future Cities.” This series aims to bring the latest research on planning, managing and transforming cities to places where this knowledge has the highest benefit for its citizens. “Future Cities” provided an overview, and this course will focus on livability in existing and new cities.
Understanding a city as a whole, its people, components, functions, scales and dynamics, is crucial for the appropriate design and management of the urban system. While the development of cities in different parts of the world is moving in diverse directions, all estimations show that cities worldwide will change and grow strongly in the coming years. Especially in the tropics over the next 3 decades, it is expected that the number of new urban residents will increase by 3 times the population of Europe today. Yet already now, there is an extreme shortage of designers and urban planners able to understand the functioning of a city as a system, and to plan a sustainable and resilient city. To answer questions like: Which methods can contribute to the sustainable performance of a city, and how can we teach this to the next generations, the ETH Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore has produced over the last 3 years many necessary research results. “Future Cities” aims to bring these latest results to the places where they are needed most.The only way to better understand the city is by going beyond the physical appearance and by focusing on different representations, properties and impact factors of the urban system. For that reason, in this course we will explore the city as the most complex human-made “organism” with a metabolism that can be modeled in terms of stocks and flows. We will open a holistic view on existing and new cities, with a focus on Asia. Data-driven approaches for the development of the future city will be studied, based on crowdsourcing and sensing. At first, we will give an overview of the components and dynamics of the future cities, and we will show the importance of information and information architecture for the cities of the future. The course will cover the origins, state-of-the-art and applications of information architecture and simulation. “Future Cities” will provide the basis to understand, shape, plan, design, build, manage and continually adapt a city. You will learn to see the consequences of citizen science and the merging of Architecture and information space. You will be up-to-date on the latest research and development on how to better understand, create and manage the future cities for a more resilient urban world.
Robots are rapidly evolving from factory workhorses, which are physically bound to their work-cells, to increasingly complex machines capable of performing challenging tasks in our daily environment. The objective of this course is to provide the basic concepts and algorithms required to develop mobile robots that act autonomously in complex environments. The main emphasis is put on mobile robot locomotion and kinematics, environment perception, probabilistic map based localization and mapping, and motion planning. The lectures and exercises of this course introduce several types of robots such as wheeled robots, legged robots and drones.This lecture closely follows the textbook Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots by Roland Siegwart, Illah Nourbakhsh, Davide Scaramuzza, The MIT Press, second edition 2011.
Want to produce cartographic visualizationsto better communicate the results of your project or research? Or you are just interested inusing modern web technologies for cartographic purposes? Then, this is the course for you! Introduction to Web Cartography: Part 1 - isa cartographic MOOC dealing with the use of state-of-the-art web technologies in order to successfully design and create interactive cartographic products. Starting with the basic understanding ofthe functioning of JavaScript mapping libraries to the successful design of an interactive cartographic product. No previous knowledge in cartography is required. Additional material will be provided during the course.
Agile methodology has taken the software development industry by storm. Everyone wants to be agile, but what does it really mean and how do you achieve agile development?This computer science course cuts beyond the agile methodology hype and teaches you the fundamental agile concepts that span a wide range of methodologies. It analyzes the key agile ideas, their benefits, their limitations, and how best to take advantage of them to enhance your software skills and show employers that you have mastered an essential component of today's IT industry.The course is divided into six parts:The Agile manifesto and the context of agile methodsAgile principles: what key methodological ideas underlie the agile movement?Agile roles: how does agile redefine traditional software jobs and tasks, in particular the manager's role?Agile practices: what are the concrete techniques that agile teams use to apply these methods?Agile artifacts: what practical tools are essential to the work of agile developers?Agile assessment: among agile ideas, which ones are essentially hyped and useless, which ones are actually harmful, and which ones will truly help you effectively produce high-quality software?Unlike many presentations of agile methods, this course takes a strictly objective view of agile methods, enabling you to retain the best agile principles and practices. For the second runof the course we have revised the learning material and created a new final exam.
What is a landscape? How has it evolved? How do we perceive landscapes? What properties are required to make us feel at home? Are you interested in these topics and want to understand how landscapes function? Then this is the course for you! We will present the discipline of Landscape Ecology, where natural and social sciences meet. You will realize how innovative and collaborative approaches used in Landscape Ecology allow land managers, planners and the public to shape landscapes for future societies. We will teach you the modern tools of Landscape Ecology enabling you to address fundamental research questions. You will also get valuable practical advice in solving existing real landscape issues. Leading Landscape Ecology professors will present case studies from around the world, highlighting tools and methods in Landscape Ecology and how they are used to solve environmental problems.
Responsive cities define the future of urbanization. They evolve from smart cities, with a fundamental difference: The citizens move from the center of attention to the center of action. Responsive citizens use smart technology to contribute to planning, design and management of their cities.Responsive cities are about bringing cities back to their citizens. Responsive cities change the way the technology of a smart city is used. The first Smart Cities were technology driven and they produced large amounts of data from fixed or centrally controlled sensors. But by now, the citizens and their mobile phones have taken the leading role in direct data generation. Rather than using data that are centrally collected and stored, you will see platforms on which the citizens place the data and the information they decide to share. With this, your own responsibility becomes a foundation of a Responsive City. Cities evolve from being smart to being responsive.To demonstrate the potential of Responsive Cities, this course will define the concept of Citizen Design Science, a combination of Citizen Design, Citizen Science and Design Science. Experts, citizens and scientists participate in Citizen Design Science. This approach is still in an early stage of development, but with the Responsive Cities Massive Open Online Course, you will be ahead in exploring and defining its possibilities.‘Responsive cities’ is the fourth edition of the ‘Future Cities’ series on urban MOOCs. The ‘Future Cities’ series is the first and complete series of urban courses dealing with the design, management and transformation of cities for their sustainable and resilient future. With every edition, the series becomes more interactive. It increasingly empowers citizens around the world to become part of the development of their own cities, especially in those places where this knowledge is needed most. Therefore, the course is inclusive for every individual interested in the planning, construction, redevelopment and management of future cities. The course is open to anyone regardless of background, skills, knowledge, or age.
Want to produce cartographic visualizations to better communicate the results of your project or research? Or you are just interested in using modern web technologies for cartographic purposes? Then, this is the course for you! Introduction to Web Cartography is a cartographic MOOC dealing with the use of state-of-the-art web technologies in order to successfully design and create interactive cartographic products. Starting with the basic understanding of the functioning of JavaScript mapping libraries to the successful design of an interactive cartographic product. To improve your learning experience, we strongly recommend that you first finish the course Introduction to Web Cartography: Part 1before moving on to Part 2. Some additional material will be provided during the course.
Cities are first and foremost built for people, and in today’s world, people produce large amounts of valuable data, thus contributing to what we call “smart cities." As almost every building and every city is a prototype, these communities are in the early stage of development and require specific attention and expertise as we advance.Smart cities, such as Zurich and Boston, consist of human-made structures or environments that are, in some capacity, monitored, metered, networked and controlled. With this functionality, combined with stationary sensors and mobile devices, data and information have become the new building materials of future cities. Using this data, citizens are now beginning to influence the design of future cities and the re-design of existing ones.In this architecture course, you will learn the basics of information cities and urban science research, as well as how dynamic behavior and citizen-driven learning differentiate the responsive city from the smart city. The cities we present and develop in this course use the stocks and flows of information as the main drivers of change.To deepen your knowledge of smart cities and give a perspective on the future of these cities, we also introduce the concept of citizen design science, a combination of citizen science, urban design, and cognitive design computing. Participants will furthermore have unique access to a design research platform for citizen design science. The intelligent use of data and information is at the core of this course, and these concepts will be the next generation of participatory design and design computing environments.This course is part of the “Future Cities” XSeries, and builds on the experiences from our first two urban MOOCs: Future Cities and Livability in Future Cities.
Autonomy and AI are all around us, revolutionizing our daily lives. Autonomous vehicles have a huge potential to impact society in the near future. Have you ever wondered how autonomous vehicles really work?With this course, you will start from a box of parts and finish with a scaled self-driving car that drives autonomously in your living room. In the process, you will use state-of-the-art approaches, the latest software tools and real hardware in an engaging hands-on learning experience.Self-driving cars with Duckietown is a practical introduction to vehicle autonomy. It explores real-world solutions to the theoretical challenges of automation, including their implementation in algorithms and their deployment in simulation as well as on hardware. Using modern software architectures built with Python, Robot Operating System (ROS) and Docker, you will appreciate the complementary strengths of classical architectures and modern machine learning-based approaches. The scope of this introductory course is to go from zero to having a self-driving car safely driving on a road.This course is presented by Professors and Scientists who are passionate about robotics and accessible education. It uses the Duckietown robotic ecosystem, an open-source platform created at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and now used in over 80 universities worldwide.We support a track for students to deploy their solutions in a simulation environment and an option for learners to engage in the tangible, hands-on learning experience by procuring a low-cost Jetson Nano-powered Duckiebot kit, e.g., from here.This course is made possible thanks to the support of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich), in collaboration with the University of Montreal (Prof. Liam Paull), the Duckietown Foundation, and the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (Prof. Matthew Walter).