AT MAN'S STEP 2007: modeling and simulation of crowds and pedestrian behaviors

The current scientific and technological research context aiming at studying the behavior and peculiarities of crowds and pedestrians’ groups shows a fertile ground for highly innovative applications for engineering, urban planning, architectural design, public order management. The relevance and growing interest of this type of applications is related to their focus on people security, safety and comfort, and in order to design and develop effective models and tools (simulation software, data acquisition technologies and methodologies) that suitably take into account the complexity of crowds, these projects clearly and inherently require multidisciplinary investigations. At the same time, the interest of human and social sciences on crowding peculiar phenomena and behavior is continuously growing, together with the awareness that the current economical, social and political scenario can be described, as early envisaged at the end of last century, as "the ERA OF CROWDS" (G. Le Bon, "The Crowd: A study of the Popular Mind", (1895)).

Within 2007 Summer Computer Simulation Conference, the At man’s step track aims at providing a multidisciplinary forum for researchers of computer science, engineering, sociology, psychology, and any other involved discipline to present and discuss experiences, ideas, and proposals in adopting innovative tools, methods, approaches and methodologies in the design, development and use of computer simulation to study the complex behavior and dynamics of crowds. The track is thus open to all the issues related to the adoption of computer simulation as a tool for crowds’ studies; overviews and states of the arts about social and psychological aspects of crowds are also welcome.

Topics of interest for the track include (but are not limited to):

• crowds and self-organizing complex systems
• sociophysics and computational models of crowds
• simulation software tools
• methodologies for crowds’ study
• technologies for data acquisition on crowds (e.g. positioning systems, image analysis)
• crowds and emotions
• interdisciplinary experiences