Public lecture 'How do we walk in crowds?'

Busier urban areas, together with raised expectations in terms of safety and commuting efficiency, call for a deep understanding of human crowd dynamics. 

From indoor to outdoor environments, from diluted to dense regimes, crowd flows present extremely challenging physics. Made of special "active" granular particles –pedestrians – they have deep connections with the dynamics of fluids. Comprehending and modeling crowd flows is however much more than an outstanding fundamental issue; it entails the capability of rendering our environments, such as stations, museums, and walkways, smarter, and capable of accommodating more people in higher comfort. 

In this talk, I will provide an overview of the field of "crowd dynamics", and discuss our recent naturalistic experiments - outdoor and in museums - aimed at modeling and steering the crowd behavior via the analysis of millions of trajectories.

Alessandro Corbetta is an Assistant Professor and NWO-VENI fellow at the Department of Applied Physics at Eindhoven University of Technology.

His research activity is at the interface between complex flowing matter, physics for society, and machine learning for nonlinear physical systems. Since 2013, in the context of the "Crowdflow" topical group, his goal is to advance our fundamental understanding of pedestrian crowd flows.

Dr. Corbetta graduated in Applied Mathematics at Turin Polytechnic (Italy) in 2011, with a work high performance plasma simulation conducted at Los Alamos National Laboratory (NM, US). He has a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Eindhoven University of Technology, and in Structural Engineering from Turin Polytechnic, both acquired in 2016.

You can watch the lecture here: