Real crowds in virtual environments

Understanding the collective dynamics of crowd movements during stressful emergency situations is central to reducing the risk of deadly crowd disasters. Yet, their systematic experimental study remains a challenging open problem due to ethical and methodological constraints.

Walking with the flow

Recently, I have published a new article in PLoS Computational Biology entitled “Traffic Instabilities in Self-Organized Pedestrian Crowds“. This article is the result of the joint efforts of four different research groups: The CRCA in Toulouse (to which I was affiliated at that time), the INRIA-Bunraku in Rennes, the IMT in Toulouse and the LPT …

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Christmas crowds

Here we go! It’s Christmas again! And as usual, commercial streets, shops, and malls are getting totally crowded over the week-end. Bad news? Not for everybody…For me, it’s the best moment to go fishing some data for my research. Here is a short sample of what I got today: a very dense bidirectional flow of …

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The side preference

Today, I would like to talk about my very first research project. I undertook it during the first year of my PhD thesis, at the University of Toulouse and at the ETH Zürich. The main question we addressed in this work is very simple: How do people avoid each other?