Modeling crowd behavior is an important challenge for cognitive modelers. We propose a novel model of crowd behavior, based on Festinger’s Social Comparison Theory, a social psychology theory known and expanded since the early 1950’s. We propose a concrete framework for SCT, and evaluate its implementations in several crowd behavior scenarios. The results show improved performance over existing...

This paper describes CrowdREquire, a platform that supports requirements engineering using the crowdsourcing concept. The power of the crowd is in the diversity of talents and expertise available within the crowd and CrowdREquire specifies how requirements engineering can harness skills available in the crowd. In developing CrowdREquire, this paper designs a crowdsourcing business model and mar...

This paper proposes a framework for the visualization of crowd walking synchronization on footbridges. The bridge is modeled as a mass-spring system, which is a weakly damped and driven harmonic oscillator. Both the bridge and the pedestrians walking on the bridge are affected by the movement of each other. The crowd acts according to local behavioral rules. Each pedestrian is provided with a k...

Real world models of large-scale crowd movement lead to computationally intractable problems implied by various classes of non-linear stochastic differential equations. Recently, cellular automata (CA) have been successfully applied to model the dynamics of vehicular traffic, ants and pedestrians’ crowd movement and evacuation without taking into account mental properties. In this paper we stud...

The excessive vibration caused by crowds walking across footbridges has attracted great public concerns in the past few decades. This paper presents, from considering the dynamic characteristics of the bipedal crowd model, a new stability limit criterion based on the bipedal excitation model. The stability limit can be used to estimate the upper boundary of crowd size. In addition, the dynamic ...

Ten years ago, Cutler and Gruber [Cutler, D., Gruber, J., 1996. Does public health insurance crowdout private insurance? Quarterly Journal of Economics 111, 391-430] suggested that crowd-out might be quite large, but much subsequent research has questioned this conclusion. Our results using improved data and methods clearly show that crowd-out is still significant in the 1996-2002 period. This ...

Abnormal crowd behavior detection is an advanced topic researched in fields of computer vision and digital image processing. The problems such as diversity of monitoring scene, different crowd density and mutual occlusion among crowds etc result in a low recognition rate for abnormal crowd behavior detection. In order to solve these problems, this paper combines a streakline model based on flui...

We present an example-based crowd simulation technique. Most crowd simulation techniques assume that the behavior exhibited by each person in the crowd can be defined by a restricted set of rules. This assumption limits the behavioral complexity of the simulated agents. By learning from real-world examples, our autonomous agents display complex natural behaviors that are often missing in crowd ...

Modeling crowd behavior is an important challenge for cognitive modelers. Unfortunately, existing computational models are typically not tied to cognitive science theories, and are rarely evaluated against human crowd data. We investigate a general cognitive model of crowd behavior, based on Festinger’s Social Comparison Theory (SCT). We evaluate the SCT model on general pedestrian movement, an...

Crowd motion analysis in public places is an important research subject in the monitoring field. This paper proposes an approach for detecting abnormal crowd motion using Hidden Conditional Random Fields Model (HCRF). This approach derives variations of motion patterns from direction distribution of the crowd motion obtained by the optical flow and these variations are encoded with HCRF to allo...