The Kumbh Mela experiment: Measuring and understanding the dynamics of mankind’s largest crowd
Kumbh Mela is the largest religious festival in the world, and involves the pilgrimage of some 100 million Hindus to a sacred river. The next festival will take place in Ujjain in 2016. Unfortunately, many of the previous versions of this event have been marred by accidents and deaths. Human crowds are complex adaptive systems, making predicting their behaviour challenging. The Kumbh Mela Experiment combines geoinformatics and remote sensing with computational science. The project will develop sophisticated methods and algorithms to aid planners and event managers in managing such extremely large crowds.