title: Quantifying crowd size with mobile phone and Twitter data.
abstract: Being able to infer the number of people in a specific area is of extreme importance for the avoidance of crowd disasters and to facilitate emergency evacuations. Here, using a football stadium and an airport as case studies, we present evidence of a strong relationship between the number of people in restricted areas and activity recorded by mobile phone providers and the online service Twitter. Our findings suggest that data generated through our interactions with mobile phone networks and the Internet may allow us to gain valuable measurements of the current state of society.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Complexity Science , Warwick Business School, University of Warwick , Coventry CV4 7AL, UK ; Data Science Lab, Behavioural Science , Warwick Business School, University of Warwick , Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.
authors.forename: Federico
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Botta
authors.affiliation: Data Science Lab, Behavioural Science , Warwick Business School, University of Warwick , Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.
authors.forename: Helen Susannah
authors.initials: HS
authors.lastname: Moat
authors.affiliation: Data Science Lab, Behavioural Science , Warwick Business School, University of Warwick , Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.
authors.forename: Tobias
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Preis
keywords: complex systems; computational social science; data science