Crowd science and crisis communication, how to use AI in emergencies

Sometimes inspiration for a career comes from unexpected places, in the case of Dr Keith Still, it was a Freddie Mercury tribute concert for AIDS awareness in 1992. He explains that while there, he was puzzled that the crowd management worked that night at Wembley Stadium in London but not at Hillsborough three years previously when 97 people died in a fatal crowd crush at a football match in Sheffield. “Why did Hillsborough fail?” he asks.

He resorts to a physics analogy to help explain. He describes the flow of grains of sand in an egg timer and compares them to the flow of people in a crowd around a ticket barrier. He developed a model that demonstrated that crowds don’t flow like grains of sand and that early puzzled thinking led him to pursue a doctorate in crowd dynamics. He has spent a nearly four-decade long career combining science and human behaviour about why crowds behave the way they do and how best to manage them.

One consequence of this work has been the creation of what he calls “a vocabulary of crowd science.” He first came across the emergency services while lecturing at the Emergency Planning College and found that he had to simplify the language and the tools into a vocabulary they understood and could then be used in their own emergency planning activities.

“Crowd management and crowd dynamics is all about understanding the crowd’s fundamental needs and wants and facilitating that.”

He is quick to point out that this is not about crowd control, it is not about barriers and trying to get people to do what you want them to do. The vocabulary of crowd management codifies the environment so that it is understood by all and in the case of major incidents with different emergency services involved, the consistent use of language is critical. For example, he says the crowd can be described as ‘free flowing’ or ‘congested;’ a crowd’s density can be measured in metres squared and so on.

Consistent vocabulary is the essence of JESIP after all.

Touching on major incidents from the last decade, Keith says that crowd science helps incident commanders understand the risks and helps create what he calls a decision support matrix. By this he means the strategy and the tactics required to deal with something happening in a venue, whether that’s someone behaving suspiciously or at the start of an incident.

Looking ahead to his appearance at The Emergency Services Show where he will be on a panel hosted by Emergency Planning Society Chair Jeannie Barr, Keith explains the these principles also help deal with modern crisis communications challenges that are emerging from AI.

One element of that communication is at the venue itself, with AI being used to provide authoritative and reassuring messaging to audiences so that they trust what they hear and are not diverted by misinformation. He will share more on that during the session where he will be joined by emergency planning experts, Stephen Arundell and Andy Holdsworth.

Communicating the truth during a crisis and how to wade through AI slop is on the Protecting the Protectors stage on 16 September at The Emergency Services Show. Join them at 1515 after listening to our keynote speaker, Lucy Easthope, sharing the lessons from her career responding in the aftermath of disasters. Register to attend here.