Real-Time Social Event Analytics

Managing public safety at large events is important. Crowd control and traffic management are particularly relevant for non-ticketed events in public spaces. In such cases, it can be difficult for organisers to anticipate the number of people who will attend and to validate the event’s success [1]. Given the ubiquitous nature of mobile phones, Call Detail Records (CDRs), which are the logs of user transactions with a mobile phone service provider, have been widely used to study urban processes [2], [3], [4]. By building on the work of [5] and [6] our research explores the use of real-time CDR data as a proxy to estimate the density of crowds in different areas of a city while events are taking place. The research has also been extended to estimate the density of vehicles on the main access routes to a city. This has led to the development of an application entitled Social Event Analytics (SEA) which provides both real-time and historic information about crowd and vehicle densities. The application can be used by authorities and event organisers to manage the event and gauge its success. The application was used in January 2015 for monitoring city wide events in Mons, Belgium which marked the launch of Mons as the European City of Culture for 2015. Using SEA local police simultaneously monitored the density of vehicles on the road network and the crowd density in different areas of the city. Below, we briefly describe the new real-time data analysis which we carried out for this specific case in which over 20 million CDRs were analysed each day. The results are useful for authorities but will also help to further our knowledge of human processes in urban environments.