INTRODUCTION
Seminar flyer
Speaker abstract and bios
The seminar aims to bring together policy makers, first
responders and academics. Disasters happen, but can
fatalities be reduced through the use of technology and
better information to enable evacuees to make
life-saving decisions? We cannot set up experiments with
real disasters, but we can simulate them on a computer
to study evacuation dynamics. The seminar speakers will
discuss how first responders deal with such emergencies
in practice and how academics model and simulate these
disasters. Can these state of the art models help save
lives? How can a complexity theory approach help policy
makers?
This ESRC Complexity seminar is held in conjunction
with the FP7 European project SOCIONICAL.
SOCIONICAL is using complexity theory to model and
simulate evacuation dynamics after a major disaster such
as the 7 July 2005 London underground bombings; this is
the emergency stream of work which is also studying how
essential information can be disseminated during a
disaster to aid the evacuation and reduce fatalities.
One technology being tested is the use of ambient
intelligent computing devices (e.g.mobile phones) to
provide the necessary information, on what is happening,
which are the clear exits and which the safest paths;
and how this information may affect the decisions of
survivors. The second stream of work is focusing on
transport and is studying new ‘intelligent’ devices in
cars that provide drivers with information about the
state of traffic and how other drivers are behaving. The
challenge is integrating the two streams of evacuation
and traffic, and developing new modelling techniques
based on complexity theory.
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