Rein Ahas, professor in human geography at the University of Tartu, passed away on 18 February 2018 at the age of just 51.
Professor Ahas was an embodiment of the ideal geographer. He has worked in physical geography, nature conservation, human geography and also in the domain of Location-based Services, where he can be seen as one of the pioneers in establishing a methodology based on mobile phone positioning. It provides a more comprehensive way to measure the behaviour of society and personal activity space, in order to find solutions for many planning tasks and practical decisions. He successfully organised several international research meetings and conferences including the ‘Mobile Tartu’ conference series incorporating many topics related to LBS.
The Smart City real-time geographical approach created in collaboration with world-leading centres of excellence (Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Switzerland, Ghent University in Belgium, Tsinghua University in China and many others) is applied increasingly all over the world. Professor Ahas introduced ‘Smart Cities’ as a lecture series whilst working as a visiting professor in many worldwide locations. Several foreign PhD students and postdoctoral researchers have come to study and develop the topic in Tartu.
He was actively participating in the conference series on Location-based Services from the beginning and just weeks before he passed away he won the price for the Best Paper at the LBS Conference 2018 in Zürich. He was editor of an issue of the Journal on LBS from selected papers of the last Mobile Tartu Conference 2016 and he was an active member of the Editorial Board of the Journal on LBS for many years.
Colleagues all over the world having known the work of Rein Ahas or him personally are left speechless about the loss we are facing.
Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria
[email protected]http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2002-5339