Dear FCL Community,

The past semester at the Zurich hub saw the completion of several outstanding PhD projects, each making significant contributions to urban science, energy systems, and digital innovation. We are proud to highlight their achievements:

• Deepika Raghu (CFC, supervised by Catherine De Wolf) tackled the challenge of cataloguing building facade materials. Using a multi-label classification approach that integrates GIS and street-level imagery, her method achieved a macro-averaged F1 score of 0.96 across cities like New York, Tokyo, and Zurich. This scalable, open-access solution—now available in the Urban Resource Cadastre Repository—provides a valuable resource for automated building material detection.

• Javier Argota Sánchez-Vaquerizo (SUE, supervised by Dirk Helbing) explored how simulations can enhance city planning by working with urban complexity rather than against it. His research—spanning virtual reality experiments, urban simulations, and big data analysis—demonstrates how urban digital twins can foster more collaborative, diverse, and adaptable spatial design, ultimately improving policy-making and city planning processes.

• Justin McCarty (POW, supervised by Arno Schlueter) focused on the role of urban photovoltaics (UPV) in mitigating climate change. His research examined four critical aspects: scaling UPV deployment, optimizing simulation accuracy for electrical performance, tailoring PV system configurations to different urban contexts, and determining optimal timing for large-scale implementation.

• David Bucher (CFC, supervised by Catherine De Wolf) investigated how decentralized data marketplaces can address current data management challenges. His thesis demonstrates how Web 3.0 principles—particularly decentralization—can enhance data security, streamline processing, and enable a multi-party, multi-phase data ecosystem, improving efficiency across the industry.

We congratulate these researchers on their exceptional work and look forward to their contributions in shaping the cities of the future.

Best regards,

Julio Paulos