Seatfinder gives on overview of free learning and working places, e. g. in libraries. Seatfinder has been developed at the KIT Library.
The current number of occupied and free seats at nearly all locations is estimated every 5 minutes from the number of devices (e. g. smartphones, tablets, notebooks, ..) that are currently logged into the wireless access points at these locations and, if available, from the number of used Ethernet ports. The estimation method is based on a machine learning algorithm that uses manual counts or estimates from library employees as training data.
For technical reasons, at some locations the number of active network connections cannot be determined so that the displayed allocation is solely based on manual counts. If the currently displayed allocation is older than 10 minutes, the last update is shown below "Update".
A note on privacy: Of course, Seatfinder does not capture data of individual network devices but solely the total number of all devices at respective locations. The data captured by Seatfinder cannot unveil the location of some device or user.
Arrows show the trend of occupied seats during the last half hour before the currently displayed allocation. One arrow means that the percentage of occupied seats of all available seats at the respective location has changed by 5–10 percentage points. Two arrows mean that the percentage of occupied seats has changed by more than 10 percentage points.