Congratulations to our EAGLE student Marlene Bauer, who successfully defended her MSc thesis titled “Robust and Uncertainty-Aware Informal Settlement Mapping – Cross-City Generalisation Across Diverse Urban Morphologies Using High-Resolution Satellite Imagery in the Global South” on November 12, 2026.
Marlene’s thesis explored whether artificial intelligence techniques in image analysis allow to map informal settlements in a city that has never been seen by the algorithm, and how much we can trust the results. She investigated how well deep learning models can identify informal settlements in satellite imagery across 12 cities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where urban structures and settlement patterns vary considerably. Each model was tested on a city it has never encountered during training, revealing how well it generalizes to new urban contexts. Beyond identifying informal settlements, the models also estimated the likelihood of each prediction and its associated uncertainty. The findings highlight the potential of AI to map informal settlements across diverse cities, even where local data are scarce. By estimating both the likelihood of informal settlements and the uncertainty of these predictions, the approach provides a more nuanced picture of settlement patterns and the reliability of the resulting maps
The work was supervised by Prof. Hannes Taubenböck and Dr Thomas Stark (DLR) as well as Dr Michael Wum (DLR).
Congratulations, Marlene, for the inspiring presentation, on the successful defense and on your great scientific work.
