Markus Kattenbeck

Markus Kattenbeck is a Visiting Post-Doc Scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Department of Geography. He holds a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship (EU H2020) and leads the Spatial-HCI Lab under Prof. Ioannis Giannopoulos. His research focuses on behavioral correlates of spatial familiarity in pedestrian navigation, leveraging gaze-tracking and spatial cognition principles.

Education: Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Regensburg (2016), followed by roles as Master’s program coordinator there. Joined TU Wien’s Geoinformation group (2019) before moving to UCSB in 2022.

Research interests span GIScience, cognitive geography, and human-computer interaction (HCI). Key themes include wayfinding processes, navigation assistance systems, and the integration of biometric data (e.g., eye-tracking) to improve spatial interface design. His work bridges theoretical spatial science with applied technologies like augmented reality.

Awards: Marie Curie Global Fellowship (2021), supporting interdisciplinary research on spatial familiarity. Collaborations include Prof. Dan Montello (UCSB) and Prof. Giannopoulos (TU Wien).

Publications emphasize empirical methods, experimental design in spatial navigation, and the ethical implications of locational data. His lab’s work on free-choice navigation and task-sensitive assistance systems has advanced understanding of pedestrian decision-making in real-world environments.