Keynote - Professor Aoife Hunt MBE

Title: The Maths of Crowd Flow

Abstract: How many people can you fit into a football stadium or a music festival? How quickly are they all going to be able to get out? These are important questions for event organisers, and they need mathematicians to help answer them. In this talk, Aoife Hunt wlll show how professional consultants use maths to understand the movement of crowds: whether at Wembley Stadium, the Olympics, Canary Wharf or the Tower of London. Aoife will explain the maths behind some of the latest technology designed to simulate crowd movement and present some of the latest research that is being conducted at the University of Greenwich and around the world. Join this session to discover how mathematicians are working to make events safer and more secure, and how computer games are being built to predict what you will do in an emergency.

Aoife is Professor of Crowd Safety and Security Science at the University of Greenwich, and a leading specialist in people movement, crowd dynamics and emergency evacuation strategies. She has over 17 years’ experience in simulating human behaviour and pedestrian dynamics and has led high profile projects across the globe, advising on all aspects of people movement and behaviour in buildings, hospitals, stadia and events, the public realm, and transport systems. She has delivered more than 80 projects in pedestrian and evacuation planning, contributing to capacity assessments, design reviews, event and concert planning, vertical circulation assessments, static and dynamic crowd modelling, flow and density analysis, and alternative use assessments. She leads research projects to advance the safety and security of crowded places, specialising in human behaviour in emergencies and pedestrian movement through security overlays, including through hostile vehicle mitigation (HVM) barriers, and search and screening checkpoints. She is a specialist in designing CCTV studies of human behaviour and led the world’s largest study into virus transmission risk behaviours in crowded places during the COVID-19 pandemic.