Whether it’s music festivals, major sporting events or demonstrations: crowd monitoring, i.e. gaining a precise overview of the size of a crowd, the mood and the dynamics behind developing situations is an important security factor. The DIGITAL Institute has been trialling a tool designed to produce real-time snapshots of any given situation. As part of the MUSIG project, researchers from the DIGITAL Institute and their partners examined innovative approaches to the analysis of flow movements and social media, in order to arrive at more efficient safety and management strategies for large-scale events and emergency situations. Applying multimodal data sources, including social media and mobile communications data, makes it possible to build up a comprehensive picture of a situation in real time. This also enables emergency service personnel to respond quickly to changes.
Deployment at the Vienna Danube Island Festival
The system was trialled at Vienna’s Danube Island Festival. It has one key advantage compared to conventional crowd monitoring systems: integrating a range of different data sources means that more precise overviews can be generated, which significantly enhances event safety. The technology also supports crisis management activities thanks to rapid analysis of crowds and their movements. The analysis is based on data from optical and thermal cameras, mobile communications, as well as location data from social media, all of which are evaluated using artificial intelligence. This allows for tracking of the number of people, the speed they are moving at and crowd density.
Social media reveal emotions and moods
Besides the specific analysis of movements, other types of information are also extracted from social media – in particular the emotions of people on site, which provides the basis for assessing mood and dynamic changes in the topics people are talking about. When it comes to projects like this, data protection is a particularly important factor. And with this in mind, compliance with data protection regulations is monitored by an ethics board. Data protection officers were closely involved in the project in order to ensure safeguarding of personal data. The project findings and the resulting technologies have helped to pinpoint important focuses for future research, as well as practical applications in the fields of event management and public safety. Funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), the MUSIG project is part of the Austrian KIRAS security research programme.
By Petra Mravlak