Walk This Way - Pedestrian Modelling informed by Video Data

In exciting news, a project for which I developed the software has been published in the ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information. Our paper is entitled "Walk this Way: Improving Pedestrian Agent-Based Models through Scene Activity Analysis", and explores how data can help inform pedestrian agent-based models. Pedestrian modelling traditionally been challenged by the need to collect data to calibrate and validate models of pedestrian movement. In our model, we use real video data to explore how different navigation metrics incorporate features of the built environment into movement patterns.

The following video shows an example of a model run, and the code to support the work is available here.

 

More information is available here!

Crooks, A.T., Croitoru, A., Lu, X., Wise, S., Irvine, J. and Stefanidis, A. (2015), Walk this Way: Improving Pedestrian Agent-Based Models through Scene Activity Analysis, ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 4(3): 1627-1656.

Thanks to the great team I worked with on this!

AAG 2015

Hi friends! If anyone will be attending AAG 2015, please consider checking out Andrew Crooks and my work on crowdsourced data and agent-based modelling! Andrew will be talking as part of a panel called "Geosimulation and Big Data: A Marriage made in Heaven or Hell?" about some of the work we've done together on ABM and big data.

The talk will include videos highlighting my thesis work, which focused on how social media and mobile phones can influence the spread of crisis-related information through a community, prompting higher-level trends. Check out the video below to see a simulation of the Colorado Springs community reacting to the wildfire of 2012!


Have fun in Chicago!

International Map Year

According to both the International Cartographic Association (ICA) and the United Nations, it's apparently International Map Year! A very happy International Map Year to everyone.

In the past year, I've been enjoying attending mapping parties thrown by the Humanitarian OSM group and using their Tasking Manager to map areas where geographic data is useful but lacking. The team has done a really impressive job of developing both a friendly, useable tool and a community to use it.

In the coming year, I'm especially excited to see what comes of the Missing Maps Project, an effort to map places where humanitarians anticipate crises but lack the spatial data to respond to them. This is similar to the kind of work that amazing groups like MapAction and CrisisMappers end up doing in the heat of the moment. It'll be interesting to see how the availability of good data during the first few hours and days of a crisis impacts the situation.

Happy new year!